There’s a classic New Yorker cartoon from years ago in which a man is sitting at his desk. His head has been sliced right off. But it’s been done so quickly and cleanly that the severed head is still resting there right on the stump of his neck. In fact, it’s all been so quick and so clean that the guy himself doesn’t even realize anything is wrong — because he hasn’t tried to move yet. When he does … well, you get the idea.

In The New Yorker’s formulation, I’ll admit, it was a bit funnier and a touch less grizzly than in mine. But we had a demonstration of the same principle playing out on Tuesday in the nation’s capital.

Before getting to the pomp and circumstance of the State of the Union, let’s look at the long-awaited beginning of the I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby perjury and obstruction trial. A lot of charges got thrown around in the opening statements — most of which aficionados of the story have heard before. The key, though, wasn’t a newly asserted fact but an unexpected claim — Libby’s lawyers charge that his client was scapegoated by the White House in an effort to protect presidential adviser Karl Rove.

Narrowly speaking, Rove can be guilty as sin and that doesn’t make Libby any less guilty of perjury and obstruction. Libby can be taking the fall, too, for other guiltier parties at the White House. But that isn’t inconsistent with Libby’s being guilty of the crimes for which he was indicted.

What Libby’s legal team must be angling for is a politically tinged jury nullification: getting the jury to look beyond the charges themselves and acquit Libby because they don’t believe he’s the guilty party who should really be on the docket for the larger crime that occurred.

That legal judgment, though, shouldn’t obscure a different calculation Libby and his team have apparently made. The Libby team now clearly believes that President Bush is not going to pardon Libby in January 2009. Otherwise, it is very hard to believe they’d be making attacking the White House the centerpiece of their defense or risking dragging Rove and possibly other presidential advisers back into the legal crosshairs. (Remember, if Libby’s team is making assertions about bad acts by other Bush advisers, we can probably assume one or more of them is going to get dragged onto the stand to answer questions about their role in the affair under oath.) Equally so, Libby’s defense strategy — which seems quite different from what we were led to expect just months ago — reflects the increasing weakness of the White House itself. Think about it: Can you imagine Libby taking this tack if the president were popular in the way he was in the summer of 2003?

Libby’s tactics in the courtroom are one sign of the collapse of Bush’s authority. The second sign has been taking shape on Capitol Hill over the last week. Coming off last November’s electoral drubbing, Bush famously acknowledged that the voters had given his party a classic “thumpin’” at the polls. Conventional wisdom had it that the president would quickly fall behind the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, especially with his new Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, who had been part of it. Instead, the president disregarded the plan completely and set up planning to escalate the battle by sending another 20,000 troops into the theater. Presidents can do that, of course. Whatever his standing in the polls, the president is the commander of the U.S. military. And Congress’s ability to constrain his actions is unwieldy at best. 

It’s on that basis that Bush has been proceeding along through January with his plans for a “surge” of troops to take the battle to the insurgents and sectarian death squads in Baghdad. But here, too, the wheels are starting to come off. 

Democrats — with the exception of pseudo-Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) — are united in their opposition to the president’s plan. And a growing number of key movers on the Republican side are going into opposition too — revealingly, a large chunk are those who have to face the voters in 2008. 

And here I suspect we’re beginning to witness the first hints of the president trying to move and seeing the extent of the political injury he sustained in November. A commander-in-chief has vast powers in wartime. But he can’t rule by decree — with complete disregard for the wishes of Congress and the American people. If he doesn’t need the House and Senate to confirm their support for his actions, he at least requires their acquiescence. And they don’t seem willing to give it. Not just the Democrats, either, but a potent coalition of a united Democratic Party and a substantial portion of the Republicans, too.

There’s a bigger confrontation coming here between Congress and the White House. The 2006 election is almost three months past. But the thunderclap is still coming. 

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com.
His column appears in The Hill each week.
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