Bush Defies Congress Again

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Vice-President Dick Cheney has decided he is not part of the executive branch and therefore he does not have to abide by an executive order which clearly specifies how classified documents are to be handled and that an oversight group is supposed to make sure that it is done.

This week the White House has also chosen to defy more Congressional requests. This time they have decided to refuse the latest request by Congress for informaton regarding the dismissal of nine United States attorneys. This action will surely escalate the constitutional struggle and bring this closer to ending up in a court showdown.

As watched on CSPAN, the Senate and the House have directed the White House and President Bush specifically, to provide a detailed justification of his executive privilege claims, and a full accounting of documents he has been withholding. The White House counsel Fred Fielding plans to tell lawmakers that he already has provided legal basis for the claims and will not provide a log of withheld documents and will provide nothing else.

This is just one more arrogant action by this White House, which is obviously trying to cause a Constitutional crisis, as they must think that they can win this one in court, or why would they take this action over such an unimportant matter. Is this just one more bypass of the Congress to keep them from focusing on something else that is being hidden and might be much more important.

The only thing that I can see that the Bush administration did that was different than previous administrations was that they only fired a few of the attorneys, instead of all of them, as President Clinton and other previous administrations had done. This type of job is always one of political payback and patronage, so why should this matter in the grand scheme of things. If they do not want these jobs to be about politics then they should take the discrentionary power of a President to fill these jobs, otherwise they should just deal with the consquences of each election and hope their guy wins next. It would seem that this is just sour grapes on the part of the Democrats in Congress, when taken in this context.

I think that the Bush has more nefarious things that they are hiding and maybe Congress should drop this minor issue and look closer and other areas of policy and abuse of power!