If anyone was wondering what the White House thought of the Senate Judiciary’s contempt citation for Rover and Bolthead this week, you don’t have to wonder much at all.
The vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee was largely along party lines, with only two of the nine Republicans on the panel, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Charles Grassley of Iowa, joining 10 Democrats to vote to send the contempt of Congress citations to the full Senate.
The Bush administration has cited executive privilege in its refusal to allow chief of staff Josh Bolten and former White House aide Karl Rove to testify or provide documents to the committee for its investigation into the Justice Department’s firing last year of nine federal prosecutors.
Majority Democrats believe partisan politics was behind the dismissals, while the White House argues the firings were performance-related.
Yeah yeah, “performance-related” like cutting players from a roster. The DoJ is a lot like the NFL, only without as many lockers.
The committee chairman, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, said it is important for his panel to enforce its subpoenas in an effort to carry out oversight of the executive branch.
“Having been directed to comply with the committee’s subpoenas, they have not done so, now we must take the next steps to enforce the committee’s subpoenas. It is not a step I wanted to take. In fact I have tried for many months for ways to work with the White House to avoid such confrontation,” he said.
Senator Specter, the top Republican on the committee, agreed, although he noted that the issue would likely land in federal courts and not be resolved until after President Bush leaves office in January 2009.
“I vote for the contempt citations knowing that it is highly likely to be a meaningless act because it takes a long period of time to enforce the process and have a judicial determination. But I think in this context we have no alternative but to proceed to do that,” he said.
A meaningless act. Oversight, to this man, is a meaningless act. Great. But…these are finally moving forward. The White House response?
At the White House, spokeswoman Dana Perino called the committee action “a futile effort.”
“The Department of Justice would not require a U.S. attorney to convene a grand jury or otherwise pursue a prosecution of an individual who carries out a president’s instruction not to provide documents or testimony on the basis of the president’s assertion of executive privilege,” she said.
The House Judiciary Committee also has approved contempt resolutions against chief of staff Bolten and former White House lawyer Harriet Miers.
Ahh. So the response is a carefully crafted and politely measured “fuck you and your subpoenas, there’s not a damn thing you can do to us.”
Got that Congress? The White House’s official response is that Bush can tell Congress to go intercourse itself whenever he wants to for the sole reason that Bush can tell Congress to go intercourse whenever he wants to.
Your puny human laws do not apply to Bush. Bush is above it. His executive privilege trumps the rule of law and the Constitutional role of Congress because Bush gets to decide what the constitution means.
Bush not only chooses to enforce the law as Executive. Bush issues signing statements to enforce only the laws he wants to enforce as actual laws, he is Legislative. Bush interprets the laws in the way he wants to interpret them, and he decides if it is fair or not, he is Judiciary as well.
He is Maximum Leader. That’s what Bush is saying here. That’s what is at stake. The American people need to know that and a lot of them do. They want somebody to stop Bush.
But impeachment is off the table. Power is useless if you refuse to exercise it. So Bush is right by default. Two hundred thirty years of democracy have been a “futile effort” if Congress does not move to impeach Bush now.
But they won’t. It’s a “futile effort”.
