I find myself leaning more and more toward firing up the impeachment machinery.

There’s really no end to this administration’s lust for power. This is truly astonishing:

…administration officials argued yesterday that Congress has no power to force a U.S. attorney to pursue contempt charges in cases, such as the prosecutor firings, in which the president has declared that testimony or documents are protected from release by executive privilege. Officials pointed to a Justice Department legal opinion during the Reagan administration, which made the same argument in a case that was never resolved by the courts.

“A U.S. attorney would not be permitted to bring contempt charges or convene a grand jury in an executive privilege case,” said a senior official, who said his remarks reflect a consensus within the administration. “And a U.S. attorney wouldn’t be permitted to argue against the reasoned legal opinion that the Justice Department provided. No one should expect that to happen.”

In other words, if Congress determines someone in the Bush administration is in contempt of Congress, the Bush administration is saying it doesn’t matter, because the executive enforces the laws, and in this case, the executive can simply tell its U.S. attorneys not to enforce it, and ignore the will of Congress.

This administration is essentially saying that it and it alone determines when the people who work for it have broken the law, and no other branch of government has any say in the matter. As my colleague Jacob Sullum explains, even if you think the U.S. attorney firings are a non-issue, the implications of this assertion of power are frightening:

Under this theory, could the president also block the prosecution of an official who, say, tortured a prisoner or conducted illegal surveillance, if the president determined that such measures were necessary, proper, and constitutional tactics in the war on terrorism?

Meanwhile, the White House has issued an executive order (who has time for the legislative process?!?) claiming the right to seize the property of broadly-defined “certain persons who threaten stabilization efforts in Iraq.”

I found this clause, which is part the section defining whose property may be seized, interesting:

(B) [persons] undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq or to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people;

You could make a pretty good case that those “”undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction” would include those companies with no-bid contracts that have vastly overbilled U.S. taxpayers for their services, the corrupt cronyists, or even the Bush administration itself, which appointed unqualified Heritage Foundation interns and GOP donors with no expertise to head up major Iraqi government agencies and reconstruction projects.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 20th, 2007 at 11:08 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.