Get ready, because it’s going to be high noon at the political and judicial corral.
The ostensible issue: getting the bottom of what was behind the firing of Republican prosecutors who were either pursuing Republicans or wouldn’t be pressured to speed up cases against the Democrats right before the elections.
The scene is now set for the final two years of the Bush administration to be one of political and judicial confrontation and accentuated partisan polarization. It will provide lots of fodder for the news media and new media and be a boon to talk show hosts of the right and left. The players will include:
Just look at some of the more recent developments on this issue and it’s clear what is to come may remind some of the days of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate rolled all into one — all against the backdrop of a White House that seems to be getting ready to do what has worked so well for it in the past: frame the issue in terms of partisan Them versus not as partisan US…and move to activate its always-loyal political base:
(1) Bush threw down the political gauntlet to Democrats yesterday, framing the issue as one where if Congress accepts his plan it’s reasonable, and if they don’t it’s political partisanship, grandstanding and in effect political hackery. The New York Times:
President Bush and Congress clashed Tuesday over an inquiry into the firing of federal prosecutors and appeared headed toward a constitutional showdown over demands from Capitol Hill for internal White House documents and testimony from top advisers to the president.
Under growing political pressure, the White House offered to allow members of Congressional committees to hold private interviews with Karl Rove, the president’s senior adviser and deputy chief of staff; Harriet E. Miers, the former White House counsel; and two other officials. It also offered to provide access to e-mail messages and other communications about the dismissals, but not those between White House officials.
Democrats promptly rejected the offer, which specified that the officials would not testify under oath, that there would be no transcript and that Congress would not subsequently subpoena them.
“I don’t accept his offer,� said Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. “It is not constructive, and it is not helpful to be telling the Senate how to do our investigation or to prejudge its outcome.�
Responding defiantly on a day in which tension over the affair played out on multiple fronts, Mr. Bush said he would resist any effort to put his top aides under “the klieg lights� in “show trials� on Capitol Hill, and he reiterated his support for Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, whose backing among Republicans on Capitol Hill ebbed further on Tuesday.
“We will not go along with a partisan fishing expedition aimed at honorable public servants,� the president told reporters in a brief and hastily convened appearance in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House.
(2) The Politico reports that the GOP is bracing for a long political and judicial fight over executive privilege and for the eventual exit of Gonzales on his own terms from the post.
(3) In the same article, The Politico notes that the materials sent to Congress have “gap” — one that if this missing segment remains missing will invariably be compared to the 18-minute-gap on the Watergate tapes:
In DOJ documents that were publicly posted by the House Judiciary Committee, there is a gap from mid-November to early December in e-mails and other memos, which was a critical period as the White House and Justice Department reviewed, then approved, which U.S. attorneys would be fired while also developing a political and communications strategy for countering any fallout from the firings.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a member of the Judiciary panel, noted that six of the eight fired prosecutors were involved in corruption investigations focusing on GOP lawmakers or officials, and she questioned whether the firings were an effort by Republicans to protect their own.
(4) Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid issued a statement demanding that White House political maven Karl Rove testify under oath: “After telling a bunch of different stories about why they fired the U.S. Attorneys, the Bush administration is not entitled to the benefit of the doubt. Congress and the American people deserve a straight answer. If Karl Rove plans to tell the truth, he has nothing to fear from being under oath like any other witness.” He also issued a detailed fact sheet on the controversy.
(5) The AP notes that the Demmies are going to issue subpoenas and that the issue will snake its way through the courts:
A House committee was to vote Wednesday to authorize subpoenas for political director Karl Rove and other administration officials despite Bush’s declaration a day earlier that Democrats must accept his offer to allow the officials to talk privately to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, but not under oath and not on the record.
Would he fight Democrats in court to protect his aides against congressional subpoenas? “Absolutely,” Bush declared Tuesday in televised remarks from the White House.
Democrats promptly rejected the offer and announced that they would start authorizing subpoenas within 24 hours. “Testimony should be on the record and under oath. That’s the formula for true accountability,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Bush said he worried that allowing testimony under oath would set a precedent on the separation of powers that would harm the presidency as an institution.
If neither side blinks, the dispute could end in court — ultimately the Supreme Court — in a politically messy development that would prolong what Bush called the “public spectacle” of the Justice Department’s firings, and public trashings, of the eight U.S. attorneys.
Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the Senate panel’s former chairman, appealed for pragmatism. “It is more important to get the information promptly than to have months or years of litigation,” Specter said.
Bush, in a late-afternoon statement at the White House, decried any attempts by Democrats to engage in “a partisan fishing expedition aimed at honorable public servants.”
“It will be regrettable if they choose to head down the partisan road of issuing subpoenas and demanding show trials when I have agreed to make key White House officials and documents available,” the president said.
Bush defended Attorney General Alberto Gonzales against demands from congressional Democrats and a handful of Republicans that Gonzales resign over his handling of the U.S. attorneys’ firings over the past year.
So what’s in store? A White House that digs in its heels, passionate sound bites from both sides, legal cases galore and a legal ending that means the legal arbiter is a Supreme Court with members sympathetic to Bush’s view of the executive branch. Plus, the concept of executive privilege is not a frivolous one.
In the end, though, just as it has on some many foreign and domestic issues, Bush has chosen to opt for the most confrontational option, couching his offer as reasonable while going on the political attack against those opposing him by saying if they don’t accept his solution they’re just indulging in sheer partisanship. Once again: the polarization card.
BUT THAT’S JUST OUR VIEW. HERE’S A CROSS SECTION OF SOME OTHERS:
One thing that is fascinating about George Bush is how little he has grown in office. No, that’s not right. It’s not that he hasn’t grown, he has gotten smaller; less Presidential, more sad little man watching his paper boat circle the drain. After six years of playing The Decider he should at least have a thin candy shell of gravitas as opposed to coming across like one of those guys on Peoples Court who not only has an unshakable belief that people won’t see through his [B.S.}, but that no one will notice his artful comb-over either…. Tonights performance lays to rest any notion other than the fact that he’s not a very bright man who has nothing but contempt for a world that refuses to dumb down for him.
—Newsbusters notes that the media’s attempt to draw a parallel with Watergate may have already begun:
Some journalists are starting to project parallels between the media-fueled controversy over the Bush administration replacing eight of 93 U.S. attorneys and Watergate, what many reporters see as their glory days of the early 1970s. A brief video snippet in David Gregory’s story on Tuesday’s NBC Nightly News showed Fred Fielding, Chief Counsel in the Bush White House who worked in the counsel’s office during the Nixon administration, walking down a Capitol Hill hallway as a male voice off-camera, presumably a reporter, asked: “Does this bring back memories of Watergate?â€? NBC didn’t play Fielding’s reply.
–Glenn Greenwald has a MUST READ POST HERE where he runs excerpts of what prominent conservatives said decrying executive privilege — in the Clinton era. (But then consistency in 21st century politics is meaningless since the goal is to defeat the other side and have your side win). He also writes:
Clearly, the U.S. attorneys probe is not the only investigation the White House fears — and almost certainly is not the one they fear the most.
For that reason, it is important to them to establish principles which will prevent (or at least substantially delay) any meaningful investigations by Congress into the White House’s conduct over the last six years, and creating a privileged buffer around key administration officials and White House documents serves that purpose quite well. For that exact reason, it is absolutely imperative that Congress not acquiesce here, because genuine investigations — that which the country urgently needs — will, at some point, require this confrontation.
–The ever-independent John Cole:
Just watched Bush’s presser, and my first thought was that despite Rove’s alleged political genius, this group sure steps in it a lot. The party is in shambles, the administration is a bunch of bungling incompetent boobs and under fire, and they have no one to thank but themselves.
My second thought is that I am siding with Bush on the subpoena nonsense (despite my snarky post last night, which was actually more about the other administration misbehaviors/power grabs and how they were excused), and so will the courts. They will not allow aides to come forward and testify, and the courts will side with him. The Democrats will have to use the document dumps and other means to find out what really happened, and I am not willing to throw aside a necessary precedent that has served previous Presidents well. That doesn’t mean I think the way this was done and the reasons for firing these attornies were legit- I don’t.
—Blogs For Bush’s Mark Noonan:
My view is that the Democrats – naturally – just want to completely encircle and then ruthlessly bombard the White House from now until election day, 2008. Democrats know they don’t have the votes to really enact any of their agenda items, so the whole plan it to just make it impossible for the President to do anything, and then wait until the inevitible election of a Democrat who will clear the way for a slew of Democratic laws come 2009…
In service of this plan, the Democrats will push and push and push with their ability to investigate the White House via Congressional committees and their precious power of subpoena. By dragging aide after aide before the cameras for hostile interrogations (and we know how it works – if someone asks a quesiton or provides an answer Democrats don”t want, then the Chair will just talk all over it, and the MSM can be relied upon to cut away to a commercial whenever anyone looks like they are scoring points against the Democrats) the hope is that the works will be so gummed up that all President Bush and team will be able to do is fend off the attack…and, as an added benefit, start to look ever more guilty in the eyes of the American people (working on the “hey, if there’s all these accusations, some of them must be true” mentality of people who don’t pay close attention). The only thing needed for this to work is the cooperation of the White House, and the President is showing that he’s not going to play that game.
—The Drudge Retort (not Report): “One thing we should investigate is the softballing of Sandy Burglar and the Clinton admin record as well. Bring it on you weak kneed GOP party hacks.”
—Long’s News And Views: “In my opinion there is a major separation of powers issue here. Federal prosecutors serve at the will of the president. Let’s not forget that the Clinton administration fired all federal prosecutors and we didn’t here a peep from any of these senators.”
—Ed Morrissey has an extensive post. His conclusion:”The entire issue shows political hackery all the way around — and if the Democrats aren’t careful, they may come out as the biggest hacks of all.”
So far, no constitutional clash. Congress has requested the presence of some aides in order to look into (a) some apparent lying to congress, which is illegal and (b) appropriate legislative fixes for the institutional setup that let the purge happen in the first place. Bush has denied that request. The next step is for congress to subpoena those witnesses. I think it’s smart and proper to make a polite request first and try to work something out before reaching for the subpoena, but Bush isn’t making a good-faith effort to cooperate which is what subpoena power is for. The clash, if any, will come if and when Bush decides to just defy a properly executed congressional subpoena. There’s no political reason for congress not to use its legal powers to their full extent; the recent drop in congressional approval ratings is primarily driven by Democrats disgruntled by a lack of boldness.
It’s beginning to sound a lot like Nixon. Again. George Bush? He’s not worried about this investigation. Or others that could be even worse. No, Bush is being reasonable. Administration officials will be made available. Really. The White House wants to get to the bottom of this. Sort of.
For still more blog reaction see Memeorandum.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.