???????

I have to say this William Jefferson scenario has been puzzling. When Randy Cunningham had his home and yacht raided nobody said a word about constitutional crises. I guess the sticking point here is that the FBU raided Jefferson's office and took papers, exposing sensitive data from the legislative branch to the executive branch. The notion that the White House doesn't know what's going on in Congress, however, is quaint. They're a bunch of sock puppets. Of course, this was a Democratic representative who was raided. I'd believe they were trying to grab opposition research a lot more if they didn't have a 95-page affadavit authorizing the search, and if they didn't find $90,000 wrapped up in tinfoil in a freezer in his apartment.

Still, for some reason Dennis Hastert has been particularly vocal about this being a "constitutional crisis." So much so that The President himself capitulated, sort of:

President Bush stepped into the Justice Department's constitutional confrontation with Congress on Thursday and ordered that documents seized in an FBI raid on a lawmaker's office be sealed for 45 days.

The president directed that no one involved in the investigation have access to the documents taken last weekend from the office of Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., and that they remain in the custody of the Justice Department's solicitor general.

Bush's move was described as an attempt to cool off a heated confrontation between his administration and leaders of House leaders of both parties, particularly Speaker Dennis Hastert.

Read this high talk from great statesmen who have nullified over 750 laws with nothing more than the stroke of a pen:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said it would "provide additional time to reach a permanent solution that allows this investigation to continue while accommodating the concerns of certain members of Congress."

The president said he recognized that Republican and Democratic leaders have "deeply held views" that the search violated the Constitution's separation of powers principles. But he stopped short of saying he agreed with them, declaring the end goal was to provide materials relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation to prosecutors "in a manner that respects the interests of a coequal branch of government."

"Our government has not faced such a dilemma in more than two centuries," Bush said in a statement. "Yet after days of discussions, it is clear these differences will require more time to be worked out."

Hastert, it was revealed yesterday, may be under investigation by the Justice Department his own damn self, which seems to suggest that the Congress reacted so violently because they don't want the skeletons dug out of their own closet. The Speaker reacted by both 1) denying that he's under investigation AND 2) accusing the Justice Department of intimidating him by... putting him under investigation. Hilarious.

The speaker was responding to an ABC News report that quoted an unnamed law enforcement source as saying that he was "in the mix" of the department's separate investigation into influence peddling by convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

"This is one of the leaks that come out to try to, you know, intimidate people," Hastert said on Chicago's WGN radio.

This 45-day delay, of course, keeps the Jefferson case in the news cycle for another 6 weeks, headlining a Democrat's corruption instead of the many Republicans. But I'm really not sure what's going on at this point.