FMCDH
True. Not only so, but journalism is wrong to claim priviledge to resist subpoena of information that journalists indicate that they have but which would compromise sources. Journalists are not public officials, and the First Amendment clearly implies that freedom of the press means that journalists are not special--you can become a member of the press just by buying a printing press.
James Madison clearly laid out the Separation of Powers doctrine in two short essays.
His concern was mostly to use it to limit the powers of our Legislative Branch:
Federalist 47 (and 48)
"The reasons on which Montesquieu grounds his maxim are a further demonstration of his meaning. ``When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person or body,'' says he, ``there can be no liberty, because apprehensions may arise lest THE SAME monarch or senate should ENACT tyrannical laws to EXECUTE them in a tyrannical manner. '' Again: ``Were the power of judging joined with the legislative, the life and liberty of the subject would be exposed to arbitrary control, for THE JUDGE would then be THE LEGISLATOR.
...it is against the enterprising ambition of this department that the people ought to indulge all their jealousy and exhaust all their precautions. The legislative department derives a superiority in our governments from other circumstances. Its constitutional powers being at once more extensive, and less susceptible of precise limits, it can, with the greater facility, mask, under complicated and indirect measures, the encroachments which it makes on the co-ordinate departments...."
Thomas Jefferson's words lay out the boundaries of the issue:
'"It is essential for the public interest that I should receive all the information possible respecting either matters or persons connected with the public. To induce people to give this information, they must feel assured that when deposited with me it is secret and sacred. Honest men might justifiably withhold information, if they expected the communication would be made public, and commit them to war with their neighbors and friends. "
Thomas Jefferson to John Smith, 1807
"If the members are to know nothing but what is important enough to be put into a public message and indifferent enough to be made known to all the world; if the executive is to keep all other information to himself and the House to plunge on in the dark, it becomes a government of chance and not of design."
--Thomas Jefferson to Barnabas Bidwell, 1806. ME 11:116
Congressional demands for such information as grand-jury testimony and raw investigative data are usually based on self-serving assertions about the "public's right to know." But this must be balanced against the constitutionally protected due-process rights of investigative targets and defendants. You cannot achieve justice by politicizing it — i.e., by allowing politicians to insert themselves into the day-to-day decisions of a criminal investigation.
Can you tell us what an Oversite Committee is supposed to do. Or what it is for if it can't do anything?
Thanks in advance.