Powder Un-Drying?

I agree with emptywheel, John Conyers has kind of had it. He's been in Congress long enough to know how decayed the current one-way relationship between the legislative and executive branches truly is. So after months of wheedling, cajoling, strongly worded letters, even more strongly worded letters, and the like, he's finally starting to understand that jail is probably the only thing that the Bush Administration cronies will respond to. And so he reminded everyone today that there's a jail in the Capitol basement:

Madam Chairwoman, Ranking Member Drier, members of the Committee, thank you for this opportunity to testify on two related resolutions: 1) H. Res. 979, the Judiciary Committee’s resolution recommending that the House find White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with subpoenas duly issued by the Committee, and 2) H. Res. 980, a privileged resolution I introduced today authorizing the Committee to initiate or intervene in civil judicial proceedings to enforce those subpoenas.

Recommending that the House cite someone for contempt of Congress is a step that the Committee, and I as Chairman, take with great reluctance. Unfortunately, it is a step that is clearly necessary to preserve the role and constitutional prerogatives of Congress as an institution, in addition to getting to the bottom of the U.S. Attorney controversy.

The Judiciary Committee voted on July 25 to recommend the contempt resolution because, despite months of effort to secure voluntary compliance, the White House has refused to provide access to crucial information requested by the Committee. In fact, as of today, I have written nine letters over more than eight months trying to resolve this matter. But despite duly issued subpoenas, the White House has determined that it has the unilateral authority to prevent Mr. Bolten from providing us with a single piece of paper and to prevent Ms. Miers from even showing up at a Committee hearing.

If the executive branch can disregard Congressional subpoenas in this way, we no longer have a system of checks and balances. That is the cornerstone of our democracy, and it is our bipartisan responsibility to protect it. As our former colleague, Republican Mickey Edwards, has explained, taking action is crucial in order to defend Congress “as a separate, independent, and completely equal branch of government.”

I'll tell you, when I saw a hint of this in today's New York Times I dismissed it entirely. But I think Conyers finally understands that at stake is the legitimacy of the Congress itself. And as emptywheel notes, he has gone further than just bringing up the contempt citiations, calling on the House Judiciary Committee to intervene in civil lawsuits to force the US Attorney and the Justice Department to enforce the subpoenas. Conyers is trying to go over the head of the Attorney General here, and he has the ability to do it.

This really is a long time coming. I hear that Rahm Emanuel wants to keep the powder dry until after the elections because the Congress could lose in a court fight and would not have the ability to enforce their contempt citations in the future. But an unused weapon never struck anybody. The time to fight this out is now, before the precedent is established that a rogue President can grab whatever power he wants for himself and will face no resistance from the co-equal branches of government. I also agree with Kagro X on this:

And here's another consideration: the contempt vote was last postponed in order to avoid poisoning the atmosphere of "bipartisan cooperation" (cough, cough!) supposedly necessary for the passage of the economic stimulus package. With that out of the way, the stage is apparently set for this more confrontational issue.

But the House is also now wrapped up in the FISA issue, where the pressure is increasing for them to stand firm behind their already-passed RESTORE Act rather than agree to go along with the horrible, Rockefeller-backed betrayal passed by the Senate.

Will the House panic and back off of the contempt vote again, for fear that confrontations on both FISA and contempt at the same time is simply too much to bear? Quite possibly.

Here, it might be time to borrow a page from the White House playbook, and pursue a "flood the zone" strategy. When the White House has multiple outrages to perpetrate (as is so often the case), it does so in overwhelming waves, with no mind paid to pacing or any insistence on decent intervals in between. Indeed, the strategy seems to be to flood the public, the media, and the Democratic opposition with everything it can throw at them, all at once. And each time they've done it, the national media have been for the most part unable (or uninterested) in keeping up. Light five fires at once, and four go relatively unnoticed.

So perhaps it's time to bring out all the grievances against the executive now roiling beneath the surface inside the Congress. Why not deal with contempt at the same time as we (hopefully) fight on FISA? And why not encourage the Senate to add its pending contempt votes to the pile as well? And why not get down to issuing subpoenas aimed at the "administration's" stonewalling on questions surrounding the missing e-mails? The destruction of the torture tapes? The withholding of key documents and testimony by the Department of Education? By NASA? In fact, by virtually every department of the executive branch that's been asked to comply with Congressional oversight over the past several years?

It looks to me like the House may put up a fight on the FISA issue. Note that Speaker Pelosi very clearly lays out that a lapsing of the Protect America Act, which expires on Friday and will not be renewed (the Progressive caucus helped Republicans put a stop to that today), would not mean that any surveillance of foreign targets would stop whatsoever. Seems to me like a great strategy to have all of these fights at once, considering that a public and media distracted by the Presidential race won't take the time to figure it out.

And of course, there's the fact that whatever George Bush is screaming about on the teevee, Democrats who want to be loved by the public should do the exact opposite. Their approval numbers will skyrocket.

My encouragement is to fight. Support Conyers, support the progressives like Rush Holt who want to go back to the original FISA statute, and make Bush and his pals mental. It'll work.