Strike Up The Band, We Got Ourselves a Contempt Proceeding

We'll see how far they get with it, but Patrick Leahy is planning a vote in the Senate Judiciary committee on Thursday for contempt citations, which has been a slightly more anticipated event on Capitol Hill than the Sopranos finale.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) has scheduled a committee vote Thursday on contempt resolutions against White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former presidential political guru Karl Rove for failing to respond to subpoenas.

Under Judiciary Committee rules, the vote could be postponed for a week, but Leahy said he intends to move the criminal contempt resolutions as soon as possible. Last week, he rejected the White House's executive privilege claim in preventing Rove and Bolten from appearing before his panel, calling it "overbroad, unsubstantiated, and not legally valid," setting the stage for Thursday's showdown.

At least one of the top Democrats on the Committee is ready for this fight. The perpetual weak knees of the Democrats whenever anything close to challenging the President comes up is likely still operative, but not for Sheldon Whitehouse:

"There has not been a lot of case law on this subject. We've been going on for a long time off of Department of Justice [attorney general] opinions, and a certain amount of tradition, and how settlements and agreements in the past have shaken out. But the Bush administration has shown why it's actually important that there be a legal line drawn to hold them to, because they've redrawn all the executive lines. I think it'd be good for the process to get a court decision for once and for all on the subject so everybody knows where we stand. It'll eliminate a lot of the back and forth in the future."

It's important for these Senators to understand that this is a historic moment, with the relevance of their offices at stake. If they can't bother to fight for the separation of powers and the ability of the legislative branch to check the executive, what will they ever fight for? Whitehouse, at least, seems to get this, and is willing to push even beyond the current Administration's tenure to get a ruling for posterity.

Whitehouse doubted that the process -- the committee holding the White House in contempt, the full Senate following suit, the subsequent court fight and its resolution -- could be completed before the Bush administration ends. But he said he would see it through to its conclusion regardless of who's president. "It might be, frankly, that with the Bush administration out we'd get a better decision," he said. "We might have an administration that isn't trying to protect anything, and is just interested in the legal question."

It's not that Whitehouse expects that a court ruling on executive privilege will end executive-legislative struggles over its scope. But it would at least set a stable set of boundaries for its legitimate exercise, rather than leaving subsequent administrations free to expand it even further, he said. "The boundary of that debate has been expanded dramatically by the Bush administration, and it's important to get it back to where we're discussing things around some common principles that the court can establish," he said. "It should narrow the disagreement considerably if you've got an established legal framework in which you're having the discussion."

Right now we have a President who thinks that the only legitimate exercise the Congress should be allowed to serve is as an ATM. Today's press conference was not about Iran, it was about bellyaching over Iraq funding. What this contempt proceeding is about, in addition to getting to the truth of the US Attorney scandal, is reasserting the role of the Congress in our form of government. Nothing can be more important.

P.S.: It's amusing to me that Karl Rove is waddling around on his "please buy my book" tour, telling anyone who will listen about internal White House discussions on the 2002 Iraq resolution, and who was driving the debate in Washington, yet when the Congress wants him to answer questions on another Administration matter, suddenly he claims executive privilege. It's essentially privilege as a convenient blanket.