A First Step

The House overwhelmingly passed a bill eliminating a provision in the Patriot Act that allows the President and the Justice Department to replace a US Attorney without Senate confirmation. The voting margins in the House and Senate were well over 2/3, so I expect that the President will have no choice but to sign (though, watch for the signing statement on this one).

So the punditocracy idiots who claim that Democrats are doing "investigation, not legislation" fail to see the relationship between the two. First of all, this is legislation. Second of all, investigation IS legislating, under the duties prescribed to Congress.

I also found this interesting (h/t to Thom Hartmann, where I first heard this).

The danger then consists merely in this: the president can displace from office a man whose merits require that he should be continued in it. What will be the motives which the president can feel for such abuse of his power, and the restraints that operate to prevent it? In the first place, he will be im-peachable by this house, before the senate, for such an act of mal-administration; for I contend that the wanton removal of meritorious officers would subject him to impeachment and removal from his own high trust. But what can be his motives for displacing a worthy man? It must be that he may fill the place with an unworthy creature of his own. Can he accomplish this end? No; he can place no man in the vacancy whom the senate shall not approve; and if he could fill the vacancy with the man he might chuse, I am sure he would have little inducement to make an improper removal.

That was James Madison in 1789, on the floor of the House of Representatives. Democrats just took one more step to restore the Constitution. A first step.