Swopa comments at firedoglake are worth consideration:
"If Cheney goes down with Scooter and Karl, I'm not sure how Dubya survives -- it would be tantamount to admitting he's just an empty suit they send out to read the teleprompter while other folks run the country. Granted, they'd need the jaws of life to pry him out of the Oval Office, but Republicans in Congress might realize that he's going to drag them down with him."
Outside the delicious visualization of the jaws-of-life being applied to Little George, she makes a fairly logical point. Republicans in the Senate are behind in their fundraising goals for 2006. Liddy Dole is doing a heckuva bad job finding candidates to run. And Daily Kos has flagged a great bit about a sixteen-year GOPer in Kansas changing his stripes for the next election:
Paul Morrison, Johnson County's Republican district attorney for the last 16 years, is expected to announce today that he is a candidate for Kansas attorney general.
Morrison will switch parties and run as a Democrat, according to a political source who has spoken to Morrison.
In short, any Republican with a brain, a conscience, and a thought toward his or her political future will, post-Fitzmas, do all he or she can to distance themselves from the toxic wasteland that is the Cheney/Bush regime.
Now, there is a big difference between not allaying yourself with the toxic chickenhawks and actually throwing the Chickenhawk in Chief out of his richly-feathered coop.
But remember, it wasn't the Democrats who took Nixon down. It was his own party.