Posted on 06/30/2007 9:33:04 PM PDT by lowbridge
After six years of kowtowing to the White House, Congress is finally challenging President Bush’s campaign to trample all legal and constitutional restraints on his power.
Congressional committees have issued subpoenas for documents and witnesses in two major cases and have asked for the first — and likely not the last — criminal investigation of an executive branch official who might have lied to Congress.
Predictably, the White House is claiming executive privilege and refusing to cooperate with the legitimate Congressional investigations, one springing from Mr. Bush’s decision to spy on Americans without a warrant and the other from the purge of United States attorneys.
The courts have recognized a president’s limited right to keep the White House’s internal deliberations private. But it is far from an absolute right, and Mr. Bush’s claim of executive privilege in the attorneys scandal is especially ludicrous. The White House has said repeatedly that Mr. Bush was not involved in the firings of nine United States attorneys. If that’s true, he can hardly argue that he has the right to conceal conversations and e-mail exchanges that his aides had with one another and the Justice Department.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The issue of executive privilege took front stage when President William Jefferson Clinton was sued for actions alleged to have occurred before he was president. Paula Jones filed a civil suit in 1994, alleging that President Clinton propositioned her in a Little Rock hotel room three years earlier, when he was governor of Arkansas and she was a low-level state employee. She sought damages for “willful, outrageous, and malicious conduct” arising from the allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault.
Bernard Nussbaum invoked executive privilege when, as White House counsel, he denied Justice Department investigators access to some of Vincent Foster’s papers after Mr. Foster committed suicide.
I hate to say it, but I hope they really push this. It will keep Bush from pushing amnesty and keep the democrats occupied and out of other mischief (like pushing higher taxes or amnesty).
I think its all a lot of bull, but my disgust with the President is such that I just don’t care anymore.
You know, I could never understand how lieing to CONgress is a crime. Afterall. they do nothing but lie to us and never go to jail.
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