From Friday's Washington Post:

Bush administration officials unveiled a bold new assertion of executive authority yesterday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege.

I've heard others say that various things would be the tipping point—the point at which the American people irreversibly realize the administration's corruption and refuse to take any more—and I've always thought, "No, not yet; he can survive this." And maybe he can survive this, too, but I doubt it.

Of all the wrongdoing in the Nixon administration, the "begining of the end" was not the Watergate break-in. It was the Saturday Night Massacre, 23 3/4 years ago, in which the president fired both the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General because they had refused his order to fire the special prosecutor investigating the president's involvement in Watergate. Keith Olbermann put it this way on July 3:

When President Nixon ordered the firing of the Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the infamous "Saturday Night Massacre" on October 20th, 1973, Cox initially responded tersely, and ominously.

"Whether ours shall be a government of laws and not of men, is now for Congress, and ultimately, the American people."

President Nixon did not understand how he had crystallized the issue of Watergate for the American people.

It had been about the obscure meaning behind an attempt to break in to a rival party's headquarters; and the labyrinthine effort to cover-up that break-in and the related crimes.

And in one night, Nixon transformed it.

Watergate—instantaneously—became a simpler issue: a President overruling the inexorable march of the law…of insisting—in a way that resonated viscerally with millions who had not previously understood—that he was the law.

Not the Constitution.

Not the Congress.

Not the Courts.

Just him.

And here we are again. This administration now claims that not only does it never have to honor a single Congressional subpoena that it does not like, but also that the Justice Department must not prosecute Contempt of Congress charges brought against the administration for its failure to obey the law.

Not that all congressional subpoenas are invalid. Not that you don't have to turn over documents to the Justice Department. Only that Mr. Bush and his political appointees do not have to obey subpoenas. Not the Constitution, not the Congress, not the Courts. Just him.

This is the beginning of the end. It will be a more bitter fight than Watergate, but this is where they'll look back in 30 years and say everyone had had enough. No one can see this and pretend it's about anything other than the Bush administration willfully and with malice aforethought committing multiple felonies, as defined by duly enacted law, and demanding to avoid responsibility simply by forbidding prosecutors from enforcing the law.

Now, I've been wrong before. In 30-50 years, historians will sit with jaws agape at the sheer number of politicians who voted to remove Bill Clinton from the presidency and yet, ten years later, fought just as hard to avoid any oversight of George W. Bush at all, and at how many of them continued to obtain re-election despite these actions proving that they have absolutely no integrity and were willing to shred the presidency and the consitution for partisan political gain.

Whatever your opinion of Clinton's actions, it should be beyond debate that if allegedly lying about a legal-but-sinful sexual affair is grounds for impeachment, then allegedly lying to get the nation into war is a dozen orders of magnitude more heinous. Yet not one of those oh-so-serious politicians who oh-so-reluctantly voted to impeach or remove Clinton from office has even agreed to consider similar proceedings against Bush. If one is impeachable, so is the other, and saying otherwise should disqualify you from public office for the rest of your natural life plus 50 years.

And yet those people keep getting re-elected to office, in both parties. So I could be wrong. But Clinton enjoyed huge public support during his impeachment, just as Bush enjoys almost none today, precisely because the American people saw what was and is really going on. As a people, we have a huge tolerance for political games, even when people wind up in prison for them (pick Scooter Libby or Susan McDougal, but it does happen).

But I think it's the beginning of the end. A president with 75% approval ratings would have difficulty surviving massive cover-ups of his administration's felonies, especially if the cover-up involved a flat declaration that he and his administration alone—not his predecessors, not his followers of the other party—are alone immune from the laws of the United States of America, enacted by the Congress and signed by the President.

The country does not tolerate police departments that refuse to investigate themselves, legislators that try to write exemptions into the laws for their own crimes, or presidents who declare themselves emperor. Until this, you could plausibly deny that was what Bush was doing.

Not anymore.