But here's my question -- What happens if Congress impeaches and removes Bush and Cheney and they don't leave? What happens if Senator Clinton is elected President but Bush and Cheney do not leave? What do we do then?

If he's successfully impeached, he ceases to be president.  Same if Clinton wins the white house.  He gets removed, seized before he can down the pretzel contained in that secret capsule.

in no sense have I ever considered impeachment and defunding to be competing methods to the same ends

which removes the former main criticism you've expressed to me. And his reservations are presented as questions to be explored and clarified, not assertions.

I don't know the answer to that. But dollars to donuts the "administration" has an answer they want you to believe is definitive, should it become necessary to spring it on us.

Who can argue with that?

As long as BTD is throwing around accusations of "fraud", let's take an actual look at what Kagro X (Sat Jul 21, 2007 at 03:19:29 PM CDT) and Big Tent Democrat (Sat Jul 21, 2007 at 06:02:58 PM CDT) said.

• Kagro X: "I have never been an Iraq impeacher, though I fully understand the motivations of those who are. My interest in seeing Bush impeached arose originally from the NSA spying revelations. So in no sense have I ever considered impeachment and defunding to be competing methods to the same ends."

  BTD: "When did he decide to start werting [sic] about defunding? Now that is is picking up a head of steam. He knows that they are competing remedies."

• Kagro X:"There seems to be no doubt that [defunding] would work, as far as it goes."

  BTD: "ImpeachNIKS, like Kagro, do not respect the facts. They are like fraudsters."

• Kagro X: "Does that mean standing law would allow the occupation to continue even in the absence of funding? I don't know the answer to that."

  BTD: "To forward impeachment, impeachniks will ignore what is incovenient to their argument."

BTD can repeat that quote until the end of time, but it does nothing to solve the disagreement.  Everyone I've seen on every progressive site agrees that under the laws and consitution of the United States, Congressional refusal to fund an activity (plus a law demanding that no funds be spent on that activity) mean it must end.  Even George W. Bush says Congress has the constitutional authority not to fund his war, in the quote BTD is about to have engraved on his own rubber stamp for convenience.

The disagreement is whether or not the administration will act in accordance with those laws.  BTD says that if Congress doesn't authorize the check to pay for it, the administration has no other options.  Kagro X thinks that they'll find a weasel way around it and try to shift funds from somewhere else whether it's prohibited or not.  BTD says they can't do that.

I don't know if they can do it or not, but my personal belief is that if they think they can, they will.  Let's be blunt - the administration blatantly lies about its policies as easily as most people breathe.  The president and his staff regularly, if not daily, say things they know not to be true to get what they want.  They say the US does not torture when the evidence overwhelmingly shows that they have not only authorized torture but demanded it.  They said they were not wiretapping American phones without warrants when we know they were.  They said Saddam had WMDs when they knew he did not, or at best, did not care if it was true.  They said John Roberts and Samuel Alito had great respect for stare decisis while knowing they did not.  And they provided sworn testimony to Congress about the firings of US Attorneys that they knew—at the time they testified—was complete fiction.

Until about yesterday—no, wait, it was literally yesterday—BTD pooh-poohed "inherent contempt" because following court procedures should work, and how history showed the executive backing down in such confrontations.  In fact, BTD plainly said:

Inherent contempt is clearly driven by a lack of confidence in the courts.

It is a doppelganger for what the argument really is - IMPEACH!!!

Can you imagine the Congress arresting people?

It is a TERRIBLE idea, both politically and otherwise.

The less said the better but if you insist, I will do a post about why inherent contempt is one of the worst ideas ever.

In my reading, BTD flatly and repeatedly rejected the notion that the Bush administration would not respect the normal functioning of the courts to decide something like this—until yesterday, that is, when the Bush administration's assertion that the DoJ is forbidden from pursuing Contempt of Congress charges against anyone who has claimed executive privilege made it clear that this administration is not playing by the rules.  Now, in his own words, he has the zeal of a recent convert for inherent contempt, and says here:

IF the Bush Administration blocks a judicial remedy, then the Congress must proceed to inherent contempt proceedings. That is is also the conclusion I have reached as well.

Yet despite this, BTD continues to throw venom at those who may have come to this conclusion back when he was haughtily dismissing them as "dopplegangers for impeachment" with all the venom of Maureen Dowd trying to pick the leader of the free world via fashion sense.

No one I've seen disagrees with the idea that BTD should be right - in just about everything he's said.  Defunding should stop the war.  But then again, the normal Contempt of Congress statutory process should have produced negotiations, FISA should have prohibited domestic wiretapping, subpoenas should have produced documents from the White House, and on and on and on.  BTD maintains an intense faith in the system that, at some point, the corrupt players involved will start behaving honorably.  I can no longer maintain that faith.

I don't expect Congress to do the right thing, either, by the way, and I'm not even sure I know what the right thing is.  I'm no fan of impeachment, because I don't really want it to become the equivalent of a parliamentary "no confidence" vote, something that happens once or twice a decade.  But if every other mechanism fails, it is the constitutional last resort against a rogue executive, and I think George W. Bush's repeated dishonest actions have made it impossible to pretend it can't possibly come to that. I have absolutely no faith that Bush and Cheney will not push this to the very brink of the constitution, down to the last vote to convict in the Senate, Andrew Johnson-style.

I am a strong proponent of de-funding, but Bush saying that de-funding would end the occupation means practically nothing. At his best he says whatever might please the listener. So quoting Bush to the effect that de-funding would force him to end his occupation does not mean he would end the occupation.