Common Ground on Reproductive Health

I want to bookmark and celebrate a particular interchange in the conversation from a recent town hall that featured Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney together. The remarks by Cheney capture what I think could be an important shift the political dialog on reproductive health, trigged by the anger and revulsion of many women to the Dobbs decision, the recent Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overturned Roe v. Wade

I suspect this is why, traditionally, the pro-choice community has said it's about “choice,” not “abortion.” Still, it was enormously encouraging to watch Cheney put this into plain and heartfelt terms of her own.

Harris: And then, of course, I feel very strongly the government should not be telling any woman what to do with her body. And when Congress passes a law reinstating the reproductive freedoms of women, I will gladly and proudly sign it into law because I strongly believe one does not have to give up or abandon their own faith or beliefs to agree that—not the Government telling her what to do. If she chooses she will consult with her priest, her pastor, her rabbi or imam, but not the government. We have seen too much harm, real harm, happen to women and the people who love them around our country since that decision came down, including women who have died. And I don't think that most people who, before the Dobbs decision came down who had strong opinions about this I don't think most people intended that the harm we've seen would have actually happened.

Cheney: Can I add to this? Just to—Because I think it's such an important point. And I think there are many of us, around the country, who have been pro-life, but who have watched what's going on in our states since the Dobbs decision, and have watched the state legislatures put in place laws that are resulting in women not getting the care they need, and so I think this is not an issue that we're seeing break down across party lines, but I think we're seeing people come together to say what has happened to women, when women are facing situations where they can't get the care they need, where in places like Texas, for example, the attorney general is talking about suing—is suing—to get access to women's medical records, that's not sustainable for us as a country, and it has to change.

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Office of Impeachment

We're running out of time to impeach Bush, although I don't know that the symbolic gesture would really be a bad thing. The breaches of ethics and law that he seems to have done go far beyond the trivialities for which Clinton was brought up on charges. But it would take a long time to assemble the case, and then he'd be gone.

And soon there will be a new President that some group of people will probably think needs impeachment.

I sometimes wonder if there should be a regularly scheduled vote halfway through the term to determine if there's confidence in how things are going and whether we as a nation should just cut our losses and get a whole new administration early. Perhaps not. Sometimes it takes a while for someone to settle into office, and it might be disruptive to change too often for no good reason. The populace tries to pretend it can oversee these details, but that oversight comes at great cost and is error-prone if not everyone is keeping up, and costly in any case because of the energy put into it.

On my whimsier days, I wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea to just have an office of impeachment that just begins on day one of a presidency by building a case against the President. The two could run in parallel and if the impeachment office ever got enough to work with, it would kick in. I don't suppose that would work either, since its power might come to be abused. But I do like the idea that there could be some independent agency with the power to review what is going on in the Presidency and make sure it is really doing what it claims. It could have the power to subpoena documents and to review them in secret in cases of clear breach of authority. It could even censure or remove the President when he's gotten off track,

I know! Maybe we could call this agency a Congress. Perhaps we should amend the Constitution to have one of those. Then we'd have four branches of Government instead of the current three (Presidency, Supreme Court, and Cheney). Well, since I'm just speculating aloud anyway, why don't I go all the way and suggest replacing the oversight we've been getting from the Cheney department with a Congress instead. That would keep things simpler in a way. And it might remove the messy and redundant nature of the Cheney department, which I don't think has been entirely positive (no offense to the founders' intent intended).

Ok, I admit it, I'm just really hoping we get a working Congress with today's election. Not just one that passes laws. One that engages seriously in the issue of oversight. Not one that tries to run everything as if it were the Executive. Not a partisan entity. Just a group that takes its obligation to be an independent thinking entity seriously. A co-equal partner in the administration of the country, as it were.

A lot of the problems we've been in the practice of blaming on Bush for the last few years, while they were his fault, could have been substantially ameliorated if Congress had done its job. It's hard for it to do its job because it has a lot more people in it and they each tend to view themselves as separate people with separate agendas. But they have to get past that and work together. Because regardless of what either candidate for President has promised us, without a working Congress, it's going to be hard to deliver.

 

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This post began as a post titled “Office of Impeachment” which appears in my blog's feed in a snapshot of Open Salon taken by the Wayback Machine in 2009, but clicking on the link in the Wayback Machine says they did not save a snapshot of that post. So I have reconstructed it from my personal history of what I submitted on that date. Alas, this loses any commentary from readers, but at least it captures the spirit of the thing.

Original Keywords: politics, 2008 election, cheney, dick cheney, congress, oversight, executive branch, supreme court, senate, impeachment, office of impeachment, working together

in Much later (3-Sep-2026), the included image was generated with help from abacus.ai's with Claude Opus 4.8 (ChatLLM), original rendering by GPT Image 1.5, and edits by GPT Image 2 (Edit). Light post-processing in Gimp to reduce the resulting image in size for faster web download.