Dems Wrong on U.S. Attorneys. Much tho I hate to side with Dumbya on anything, he is absolutely right that Congress does not have the right to subpena Presidential advisors and compel them to tell Congress what advice they gave the President. Congress is not superior to the Presidency. Nor is the Supreme Court. And it doesn't matter if the Congress and Supreme Court co-conspire to strip the Presidency of power. They can't do it. The Constitution forbids it. And the President controls the military. If push comes to shove, the President has well over a million men in arms; Congress and the Supreme Court between them have a few hundred security guards. Who is going to win a contest between them?
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Dumbya is completely correct that advisors to the President need to feel that what they say stays within that room, or they will be unable to consider all options, even options that the general public may regard as distasteful. At end, tho, why do we need to inquire into the reasons discussed for a given action or policy if the action or policy itself can be examined and evaluated on its own merits. The notion that we have the right to know every step of the process by which decisions are arrived at is not intellectually defensible. Curiosity does not confer the right to know what other people are doing or thinking. There has to be an express legal grant of authority to invade people's privacy, for good reason. And if someone does something lawful, like firing people he had the right to fire, it doesn't matter what his reasons were.
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This whole issue of privacy of governmental decisions is part of a larger debate, over "open covenants openly arrived at". As a BBC "Letter from America" in 1999 put it:

It [the Sixties era] was ... the high noon of the popular doctrine that the people have a right (not specified in the Constitution) a right to know everything that's going on between statesmen, especially behind closed doors.

The idea that this should ever happen was first sprung, you may recall, by President Woodrow Wilson way back in Paris at the peace treaty meetings in 1919. Discussions of differences between nations should, he said, be aired for all to hear. One of the phrases that Wilson used as a guide to all future diplomacy took on the weight and resonance of a proverb: "Open covenants openly arrived at." In fact, the phrase was spoken and forgotten. It was not, so far as I can recall, every overly berated in any of the allied countries.

I remember with what heat — and he was not a hot-tempered man — the second secretary general of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold, with what scorn 30-odd years later he commented on Wilson's prescription. "Open covenants, yes, but they must be secretly arrived at. Publish every twist and turn and argument of a series of negotiations and you'll see the end of diplomacy itself."

We can make other comparisons here, to doctor-patient, lawyer-client, or priest-confessor confidentiality. Would anyone bare their soul to a psychologist if s/he thought everything s/he said could be subpenaed by the Government? Jon Stewart on Comedy Central's Daily Show minimized the importance of confidentiality of advice to the President by suggesting that the only thing that would be inhibited was advice to do disgraceful or illegal things. How naive, or dishonest. Would even the writers of the Daily Show want every single thing they considered to go out to everyone? Or might they find themselves in deep trouble if every word they uttered in private was suddenly broadcast to the world?
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In a highly partisan arena like politics, even relatively innocuous statements can be exploded beyond all reason into a huge brouhaha. A single word in a 2,000-word memo can be blown up into a major controversy, not because it's really important but because someone has an ax to grind and will seize on the tiniest thing to embarrass a political or ideological foe. Then, instead of dealing with the larger issue, we're off on a tangent, talking about the N-word or whether someone was insensitive to "gays" (a word I detest, by the way; "gay" is an adjective, not noun) or women or Latinos. Hell, a person could be criticized for saying "Hispanic" rather than "Latino" in a discussion about arms control, and public attention would be diverted from antimissile defense to whether Anglos are insensitive or Latins are over-sensitive. It's bad enuf when every word of every formal statement is picked apart, but when every word of every discussion leading up to a formal statement is also picked apart, that is much too much.
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Any President must be very careful as to the PRECEDENTS he establishes, to avoid eroding the power of the Presidency. If, as seems the case, Bush is correct that all U.S. Attorneys serve at the pleasure of the President, and he can thus fire any of them at any time for any reason, Congress need not inquire into his reasons, because any reason, or no reason, will do. Congress has no authority to run the Department of Justice, part of the Executive Branch, any more than the President and his cabinet can vote in Congress. In the British model, from which we deliberately departed, the chief executive and his cabinet do vote in the Legislative Branch. We rejected that idea and separated the Legislative and Executive. That was a good plan, and it has served this Republic well. Why on Earth is Congress attempting to destroy the separation of powers? And who will emerge triumphant from a merged Executive & Legislative Branch? Legislators, or the Commander in Chief of the armed forces?
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Where once we feared an Imperial Presidency, we need now to fear and athletically oppose the creation of an Imperial Congress, Imperial Supreme Court, or any combination of those two branches to reduce the Presidency to impotence. And we have even more to fear a President so furious at attempts to invade his perquisites and strip him of his lawful authority that he carries off a coup, ordering his military to arrest his opponents, or shoot them. It has happened in other places. It can happen here, unless we scrupulously abide by the Constitution's requirement that each branch respect each other branch's perquisites. Many dictators have risen by claiming that they were forced to act to protect the Constitution of their respective countries; some actually meant it. Some presidential-military coup leaders returned society to its normal institutions after a time, when they felt the emergency had passed. Other military or military-backed dictators died in office or were forced to flee the country — usually by another military coup.
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Here, Congress was indignant when an agency of the Executive Branch invaded the office of a Congressman suspected of corruption, and carted off files and computers — as well Congress should have been indignant. It is not for the Presidency to invade Congress any more than it is for Congress to invade the White House or Executive offices. What next? Will the President assert the right to tell the Supreme Court how to rule on cases? Why not?
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Where has this animus between branches come from? The Constitution's separating powers was supposed to set them against each other, yes, but in civil fashion, to preserve the liberties of the people. The present hostility, however, threatens to go beyond checks and balances, to open warfare within the Federal Government. Do we really want that?
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Congress has three legal checks upon Presidential power: (1) passing legislation over Presidential veto; (2) refusing to provide funding for Presidential programs or departments; and (3) impeaching the President and removing him from office altogether. That's it.
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Congress is entitled to cut off funding to any part of the Executive it wishes, but must live with the consequences. That is, if to punish the Department of Justice, Congress cuts funding for the DOJ so much that it can't do its job, and organized crime takes over the streets, white-collar criminals bilk scores of millions of citizens out of their life savings, etc., Congress will be held to account by the electorate — which is the ultimate check on Government power, except, alas, of the Supreme Court, which has no checks, so is unbalanced. We need to fix that.
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But first we need to remind Congress and the President to respect the boundaries set up by the Constitution. Play nice.
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If the new Congress can't stand Bush, it should impeach him, if it can. If it can't, it must abide by the Constitution and bide its time till the next election, then make a case for electing someone completely different from George Bush.
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I, myself, favor impeaching Bush for the high crimes involved in his making an illegal war against Iraq and in lying to Congress to win approval — tho not, curiously, a declaration of war — for that illegal invasion and for the ongoing illegal occupation that is destroying an entire country that never attacked us. But the Democrats won't even try to do that. Hell, they won't even just cut off all funding for that war and force withdrawal. So we are reduced to a proxy war against the President, waged against the Attorney General instead.
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The President should retaliate in like kind, demanding, for instance, that the Senate do away with the filibuster and asserting the right to tell both houses of Congress what its rules should be, who its committee chairpersons should be, etc. Let Congress see how it likes the Executive Branch interfering with its internal workings, and it may get the message. To each branch its own powers, and none of the other branches' powers. Violating that separation of powers can get very messy, and very dangerous, very quickly. And while the branches of Government are squabbling among themselves, what happens to the people's business?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,228 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:59 AM