From the Salmon

Yesterday was a Good Day.

Admittedly, the one and only reason I went to vote got positively trounced. But I had a strange feeling when I woke up in the morning, a feeling I’m unaccustomed to experiencing after an election.

I think it might be called hope.

It’s still just a glimmer, but as the day went on, it got a bit brighter. Rumsfeld out! Webb in! Yep, I’m pretty sure that’s hope.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m under no illusions that a Democratic Congress suddenly makes everything better. We’re still talking about politicians here, as flawed and as susceptible to the Siren song of power as anybody else. And as a country, we’re still in a pretty damn deep hole.

But at least it feels like we’ve stopped digging.

The truth is, the next two years are likely to be ugly. From the Bankruptcy Bill to the Detainee Act, there’s a lot of pretty awful legislation to fix, and it’s not like President Bush is going to let that happen quietly. There’s a lot that we need to know about what the hell our government has been up to over the past six years, and the Bush Administration is going to fight transparency, accountability and oversight every step of the way. It wouldn’t surprise me if at some point the Supreme Court will be asked to intervene.

I don’t celebrate the ugliness to come. But let’s be clear: an administration that claims repeatedly that laws do not apply to them, that launches a poorly planned war for reasons that at best are unclear, that hides people in secret prisons, that claims the right to tap phone lines without getting a warrant, that revokes the right of habeas corpus, that campaigns for the right to torture — that administration is just begging for ugly.

I was going to say that there is a constitutional crisis a-brewing, but that’s not quite right. It’s on. It’s been on. We just finished the third quarter of the Separation of Powers Bowl, we’re down a few rights, and the legislative starting squad is only now showing up to play.

I love the smell of hope in the morning.