NYT editorial
Abuse of Executive Privilege
After six years of kowtowing to the White House, Congress is finally challenging President Bush’s campaign to trample all legal and constitutional restraints on his power.
Congressional committees have issued subpoenas for documents and witnesses in two major cases and have asked for the first — and likely not the last — criminal investigation of an executive branch official who might have lied to Congress.
Predictably, the White House is claiming executive privilege and refusing to cooperate with the legitimate Congressional investigations, one springing from Mr. Bush’s decision to spy on Americans without a warrant and the other from the purge of United States attorneys.
The courts have recognized a president’s limited right to keep the White House’s internal deliberations private. But it is far from an absolute right, and Mr. Bush’s claim of executive privilege in the attorneys scandal is especially ludicrous. The White House has said repeatedly that Mr. Bush was not involved in the firings of nine United States attorneys. If that’s true, he can hardly argue that he has the right to conceal conversations and e-mail exchanges that his aides had with one another and the Justice Department.
When the White House refused last week to even account for the documents it was withholding and why, as presidents generally have done in these cases, Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, rightly denounced this arrogance as “Nixonian stonewalling.” He pointed out that every president since World War II has at some point complied with Congressional requests or subpoenas for testimony by members of the White House staff or other presidential advisers.
(Continued here.)
After six years of kowtowing to the White House, Congress is finally challenging President Bush’s campaign to trample all legal and constitutional restraints on his power.
Congressional committees have issued subpoenas for documents and witnesses in two major cases and have asked for the first — and likely not the last — criminal investigation of an executive branch official who might have lied to Congress.
Predictably, the White House is claiming executive privilege and refusing to cooperate with the legitimate Congressional investigations, one springing from Mr. Bush’s decision to spy on Americans without a warrant and the other from the purge of United States attorneys.
The courts have recognized a president’s limited right to keep the White House’s internal deliberations private. But it is far from an absolute right, and Mr. Bush’s claim of executive privilege in the attorneys scandal is especially ludicrous. The White House has said repeatedly that Mr. Bush was not involved in the firings of nine United States attorneys. If that’s true, he can hardly argue that he has the right to conceal conversations and e-mail exchanges that his aides had with one another and the Justice Department.
When the White House refused last week to even account for the documents it was withholding and why, as presidents generally have done in these cases, Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, rightly denounced this arrogance as “Nixonian stonewalling.” He pointed out that every president since World War II has at some point complied with Congressional requests or subpoenas for testimony by members of the White House staff or other presidential advisers.
(Continued here.)
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