Take Them To Court Now

by Steve

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Gee, they must be hiding something.

Bush, as expected, invoked executive privilege this morning to prevent former White House aide and Rove assistant Sara Taylor and former White House counsel Harriet Miers from testifying to Congress on their role in the sacking of federal prosecutors. The Bush White House, under former Nixon attorney Fred Fielding counsel is fully in bunker mode now, and the sooner the Democrats push this matter to Justice for the next step towards a building impeachment movement, the better. Fielding thinks he has a strong case because the president has the authority to fire federal prosecutors whenever he wants to. Perhaps Mr. Fielding, but does he have the authority to obstruct justice as well?

Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff says that Bush commuted Scooter Libby’s sentence to keep Dick Cheney happy, and William Kristol says that the White House choreographed the timing of the commutation so that they could attack the Clintons as well over Bill’s ill-advised pardons at the end of his term, even though the circumstances between the two events are different. Isikoff also confirms that the White House spent a lot of time re-trying the facts of the case before commuting Scooter’s sentence, which leads me back to my question from late last week: where in the Constitution does it grant the executive branch the authority to re-try cases decided by the judicial branch?

Sure, the White House wants to drag this out until January 2009, and yes, the Bush Supreme Court may rule that the executive branch has monarch-like authority to run roughshod over the other two branches. But if they do, it will only provide Hillary Clinton with the ability to make the GOP rue the day it gave the executive branch that authority.