Beginning with his press conference announcing his willingness to allow his political staffers to be interviewed by Congress not under oath, not in public and without a recording or transcript kept, President Bush and his administration have gone to great lengths to describe their level of cooperation with Congress on the matter of the prosecutor purge scandal as "unprecedented." While many have scoffed at such a notion, I think that the White House is actually correct in its assertion -- though not in the way they intended.
Leaving aside the absurdity of the notion that it would be sufficient for an administration -- any administration -- to have its officials speak with Congress under such strict regulations that they would effectively be able to lie to Senators and Representatives without consequence, the Bush administration is in some ways correct in stating that it is breaking new ground by submitting Karl Rove, Harriet Miers and others to such an examination on Capitol Hill. Yet how the precedent that the Bush administration is trying to set is not by allowing Congress to speak with political aides within the White House but rather by barring Congress from soliciting testimony in an open and responsible fashion. As the folks at Think Progress detail in depth, the previous administration allowed its political staffers, including multiple chiefs of staff, to testify in front of Congress on numerous occasions. But for those who would argue that President Clinton's submission to Congress was unprecedented, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, a presidential historian in his own right, explained last night on Countdown that the precedent for President's allowing their staff to appear before Congress goes back decades.
You know, if you go into executive privilege land, you do take us on a kind of a return trip to Watergate. Look, this, this idea that somehow presidential aides don`t have to go up and testify under oath on Capitol Hill, this is a very modern and, and, and really Nixonian notion. If you go back, say, to the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt`s top aide Louis Howe (ph), there were some irregularities in the New Deal Congress wanted to know about, they hauled him up on Capitol Hill, Democratic Congress, interestingly, they grilled him. There wasn`t even the slightest suggestion that somehow he shouldn`t be required to testify.So this is a new idea. And it, it, it`ll be shades of Watergate if they want to go to court to test it.
And as if it were not enough that President Bush is trying to set a new precedent for secrecy and executive power by shutting down a much-needed congressional investigation into the improper firing of United States Attorneys for partisan political reasons, the administration made a mockery of its offer to Congress even before it made it by sending thousands of documents regarding the prosecutor purge that excluded the key two and a half week period immediately preceding the firings, a stunning instance of disrepect for Congress, the Constitution and rule of law within America. So Alter is right -- we are heading into Watergate territory at this point. And as I speculated earlier today, this could push George W. Bush closer and closer to Herbert Hoover status as a scarlet letter all Republicans will have to wear on their chests for decades to come (apologies for the mixed historical metaphor).
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