Posted on 06/04/2007 12:37:00 PM PDT by jrooney
They still don't answer to him. They just have to work with him. The president cannot order Congress to pass any legislation -- they do what they do, and he can accept or reject it.
If the FBI had asked the Capitol Police to execute the warrant, with FBI and US Marshals assistance, I'd give 99.99% odds the Capitol Police would have gone along.
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Is it at all possible that Justice might be concerned that Jefferson was able to achieve this cornucopia of graft in part because the Capitol force turned a blind eye?
It's possible. If you have any evidence that it's true, feel free.
Let me warn you that you're trading down a steep conspiracy path here. If Justice was too concerned to include the Capitol Police in the probe, it should have been concerned enough to clue in Denny Hastert. If there was suspicion of widespread corruption in the Capitol cops, the Congressional leadership should have been notified. If they suspected that the Congressional leadership, both parties, was in on it, then they should have called in a special prosecutor and gotten the Marshals -- who answer to the Judiciary branch -- in on it.
At this point, you're eyeballing the whole Congressional leadership in both parties, the whole Capitol police force, all their staffers, and probably every reporter who split a bar tab with any of the above. Which tests the question of how many people have to be implicated in a conspiracy before it becomes absurd on its face.
If they are allowed to physically arrest a member conducting official business, they are certainly allowed to serve a warrant for his files.
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Yet more conflation of warrants for arrests with warrants for files.
You seem to be doing all the conflating.
If a police officer shows up at my door with a search warrant, he can search. If he has an arrest warrant, I guess I'm taking a ride. One does not include the other.
I am not a co-equal branch of government. I am not considered equal, or in most cases superior, to any branch of government. In short, I am not Congress.
Let me make this clear -- William Jefferson had no more privacy rights than any other citizen when the cops came to search his home. He would have no more privacy rights than any other citizen if they decided to search his car, his person, his parents' house, or a hotel room where he spent the night.
But his Capitol Hill office is different. It is property under the aegis of Congress. The executive cannot simply stomp across that threshold at will. The Founders didn't want that kind of thing, and I don't want it. Ask for the cooperation of Congress, and you'll probably get it. Not even asking is unacceptable.
Especially when the agents of the executive could have worked with the legislative if they just hadn't been lazy, blunt and dumbassed.
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LOL! Justice was lazy and dumbassed - not like those ultrasharp Congressional cops! No graft on their watch!
The Capitol police are not charged with investigating corruption. It is not their beat. In theory, the ethics committees are supposed to deal with such things -- but those committees have been frozen in place for at least the last five years, and they don't want to know squat about squat.
The ethics committees are unique. On most committees, Dems and Reps are represented in rough proportion to the ratio in the house as a whole. The ethics committees have exactly the same number of Democrats and Republicans, supposedly to ensure that they can't be used by the majority party to bludgeon the minority party.
For the last few years, neither party has wanted to investigate anything at all. They don't want to open any closet doors, because both parties have plenty of skeletons waiting to spill out. So the ethics committees have been slightly less interesting and far less relevant than my Aunt Phyllis's weekly cribbage game.
That's simply ridiculous and I suspect you are well aware of how ridiculous it is.
You show up at the Capitol Building and try to break into somebody's office
A warranted entry is not a breaking and entering.
I suppose I should have mentioned that. Oh, wait -- I did.
Speaker and President Pro Tem. End of discussion, All other leadership positions are matters of congressional rules, not constitutional law.
As do you. As do I. Congress makes the laws. That's what it's there for.
The way that immunity is taken away is that Congress expels them.
I don't know where you're getting this idea that members of Congress have some sort of super-duper legal immunity until and unless they're kicked out of Congress. Patrick Kennedy, to name just one, is still in the House, and is still under court supervision for DUI. He was arrested and struck a plea deal. There was no magical congressional immunity to make it go away.
A lot of legal concepts that are relevant to this debate are only inferential in the main body of the Constitution.
Recall the Framers didn't really think they needed all that much detail about personal privilege and right in the body, and only reluctantly agreed to amendments where some of it would be spelled out. Their theory was that common knowledge and usage would be enough to illuminate individual rights, or even institutional rights. Notice that we get references to "persons, houses, papers, and effects" in the 4th Amendment, but not in the body.
Still, there's no doubt whatsoever that the Framers would have understood that seizure of a person was not held to be more sacred than the search of a house, papers, or seizure of effects", nor vice versa.
It's been argued here that since all the FBI went after were "papers" and not Jeffeson's body, it was all OK.
Yet, no one went after Patrick Kennedy's papers and effects in his congressional office. Might be some good stuff in there you know, like cocaine, heroin, uppers, downers, bennies and other controlled substances.
So, we might ask why the AG thought fit to raid Jefferson's papers in his office and not Kennedy's. Or, did the AG (or his agents) actually try and ended up with the Speaker not giving his approval.
Might be worth your while finding out why Kennedy is given different treatment than Jefferson, the most corrupt congressman of the last few weeks anyway.
I assume "he" above is Patrick Kennedy. he got wasted and crashed his car. He's no Wilbur Mills (and Mills wasn't kicked out of Congress -- he was voted out). Point is, he was not immune from prosecution. If he had immunity, he could have told the authorities to pound sand. He pleaded out instead.
A lot of legal concepts that are relevant to this debate are only inferential in the main body of the Constitution.
Recall the Framers didn't really think they needed all that much detail about personal privilege and right in the body, and only reluctantly agreed to amendments where some of it would be spelled out.
The Bill of Rights wasn't a part of the Constitution as originally drafted, but a lot of delegates in a lot of states would never have voted to ratify without the promise that it was on the way. Even with that, there were some Founders who were staunchly anti-federalist, notably Patrick Henry of Virginia. You know how we lament that the government has exceeded its constitutional authority? Henry thought the Constitution gave the government too much power from jump.
Their theory was that common knowledge and usage would be enough to illuminate individual rights, or even institutional rights. Notice that we get references to "persons, houses, papers, and effects" in the 4th Amendment, but not in the body.
We're munging issues here. The issue I have with the search of Jefferson's office has nothing to do with Jefferson's individual rights. They had already searched his home(s), and had a warrant signed by a judge and based on probable cause. The requirements of the 4th amendment were met.
The issue in the search of Jefferson's office isn't the government against an individual, but one branch of government against another.
Imagine for a moment that US Marshals waltzed into the White House and started searching without so much as a how-do-you-do. That would be the judicial branch steamrolling the executive. When the FBI raided Jefferson's House office, that was the executive steamrolling the legislative.
Still, there's no doubt whatsoever that the Framers would have understood that seizure of a person was not held to be more sacred than the search of a house, papers, or seizure of effects", nor vice versa.
I'd go farther. The Founders chose to explicitly protect persons, homes, papers and property in the 4th Amendment. Words, writings, beliefs and associations in the 1st. Unwanted intrusion into their homes in the 3rd. They did not predict, and could not have predicted, wiretaps and surveillance cameras.
This raises the sticky question of whether you're a literalist or an originalist. The Framers enumerated limits on every intrusion into personal privacy they knew of. I think it was pretty clear that they meant to define a broad general general right to personal privacy.
It's been argued here that since all the FBI went after were "papers" and not Jeffeson's body, it was all OK.
That has certainly not been argued by me. I believe quite the opposite.
Yet, no one went after Patrick Kennedy's papers and effects in his congressional office. Might be some good stuff in there you know, like cocaine, heroin, uppers, downers, bennies and other controlled substances.
There might be gold bouillon, ten kilos of plutonium or the mummified corpse of Jimmy Hoffa. "Might be" is not the relevant criterion for a search warrant.
So, we might ask why the AG thought fit to raid Jefferson's papers in his office and not Kennedy's. Or, did the AG (or his agents) actually try and ended up with the Speaker not giving his approval.
Jefferson was under investigation for corruption-related felonies. A prosecutor argued, and a judge agreed, that there might be relevant information in papers in his office. Kennedy plead guilty to a traffic offense. No one argued, and I don't see how they could, that anything in his House office could be relevant.
I think the raid on Jefferson's office was badly handled. Probably illegal, when it could have been done legally. But I'm not sniffing around for preferential treatment -- the Jefferson and Kennedy cases weren't treated the same because the cases weren't similar.
The AG clearly undertook an armed assault, that is WAR, against the House of Representatives. There's only one appropriate punishment for that ~
No. They are House offices, belonging to the House as a body, to hand out as it sees fit. The speaker is elected by, and can be removed by, the vote of the House membership. The Speaker is a is the closest thing the USA has to a prime minister, a "first among equals" whose power rests on the assent of his peers.
No American who wasn't a member of Congress has ever cast a vote for Speaker of the House.
The AG clearly undertook an armed assault, that is WAR, against the House of Representatives. There's only one appropriate punishment for that ~
Well, at least you're not getting overwrought about it.
The whole Jefferson case strikes me as a ¿Quien es mas macho? BS debate. A lot of strutting and posturing. A pointless pissing contest.
If the FBI had just called the Sergeant at Arms and asked for permission for the search, he would probably have granted permission, and there would be no dispute. But no, that would make too much sense.
Turns out the FBI did exactly what you suggest, but they didn’t get permission.
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