Nice editorial today in the New York Times over the Congressional subpoenas ignored by White House staffers, Josh Bolten and Harriet Miers.
Here's the money quote:
The Bush administration's days are numbered. But the damage it has done to the balance of powers could be long-lasting. If Congress wants to maintain its Constitutional role, it needs to stand up for itself. A good place to start is by making clear that its legitimate investigative authority cannot be defied, and any who choose to do so will pay a heavy price.
By a substantial margin, the Indiana residents most likely to possess photo ID turn out to be whites, the middle aged, and high-income voters. And while this is undoubtedly just a wild coincidence, these are also the three groups most like to vote for Republicans. (2006 exit poll data here for the suspicious.) Overall, 91% of registered Republicans had photo IDs compared to only 83% of registered Democrats.
Blacks are the group least likely to have valid photo IDs.
Kevin Drum:
But like I said, this is probably just a coincidence. I'm sure Karl Rove and the RNC had no idea that the demographics broke down like this. Right?
Yesterday, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV (D-West Virginia) published an editorial in the Washington Post on why he thinks we should give telecomms immunity from its role in the administration's domestic spying program:
Here's why. Within weeks of the 2001 attacks, communications companies received written requests and directives for assistance with intelligence activities authorized by the president. These companies were assured that their cooperation was not only legal but also necessary because of their unique technical capabilities. They were also told it was their patriotic duty to help protect the country after the devastating attacks on our homeland.
Both the Bush administration and the telecoms jointly broke the law for years. Even as we moved further and further away from the 9/11 attacks, neither the administration nor the telecoms bothered to comply with the law. The administration was too interested in affirming the theory that the President could exercise power without limits, and the telecoms were too busy reaping the great profits from their increasingly close relationship with the Government.
I'll add to Greenwald's commentary that the spying program may have begun before 9/11, according to some reports.
Top Verizon executives, including CEO Ivan Seidenberg and President Dennis Strigl, wrote personal checks to Rockefeller totaling $23,500 in March, 2007. Prior to that apparently coordinated flurry of 29 donations, only one of those executives had ever donated to Rockefeller (at least while working for Verizon).
In fact, prior to 2007, contributions to Rockefeller from company executives at AT&T and Verizon were mostly non-existent.
But that changed around the same time that the companies began lobbying Congress to grant them retroactive immunity from lawsuits seeking billions for their alleged participation in secret, warrantless surveillance programs that targeted Americans.
This grisly report - on the conviction of Russian serial killer Alexander Pichushkin -- mentions notorious Ukrainian killer, Andrei Chikatilo, who killed at least 53 young women, girls, and boys in the most horrible ways imaginable. The interesting thing to me in the case was that Chikatilo was a suspect for his very first murder -- in 1978 of 9-year-old Lena Zakotnova -- but the police convicted someone else of the crime:
An eyewitness had seen Chikatilo with the victim, shortly before her disappearance, but his wife provided him with a cast-iron alibi that enabled him to evade any further police attention. A 25-year old, Alexsandr Kravchenko, with a previous rape conviction, was arrested and confessed to the crime under duress, probably as a result of extensive and brutal interrogation. He was tried for the killing of Lena Zakotnova, and executed in 1984.
Without the tortured confession from Kravchenko, who knows? Maybe the Soviet police arrest and convict Chikatilo for his first murder, not his 53rd. Police work is an inexact science, so it's impossible to say. What we can say, beyond all doubt, is that once the police extracted a false confession from Kravchenko through torture, Chikatilo was able to continue his ghastly work unimpeded for the next 12 years.
And when the police caught up with Chikatilo again in 1990, he confessed - not through torture - but to psychiatrist Aleksandr Bukhanovski, who had used a psychological profile to ease the killer into admitting his crimes.
Torture doesn't work. Those being tortured will tell their interrogators what they want to hear. And in the case of Chikatilo, torture had disastrous consequences. I know, I know. That's not how it works on 24...
The UK's Guardian conducted an interview with presidential candidate Hillary Clinton about the US president's executive authority. In it, she decried the current administration's overreach of powers and said, if elected, she'd curtail some of the executive's powers.
"I think I'm going to have to review everything they've done, because I've been on the receiving end of that," she said. Ms Clinton stated it was "absolutely" conceivable that, as president, she would give up executive powers in the name of constitutional principle.
"That has to be part of the review I undertake when I get to the White House, and I intend to do that," she said.
It's "conceivable" she'd "give up" executive powers? In the name of "constitutional principle"? That's not very reassuring. And is anyone else uncomfortable with the idea that our rights will be protected at the pleasure of the executive? After all, if the President is breaking the laws and violating the Constitution, he should be impeached. That's Congress' job. And how has Senator Clinton stood on that issue?
Check out the latest fact-bending propaganda piece opposing regulation over the executive's ability to spy on its own citizens, compliments of the NY Post:
Sometime before dawn, heavily armed al Qaeda gunmen quietly cut through the tangles of concertina wire surrounding the outpost of two Humvees and made a massive and coordinated surprise attack.
Four of the soldiers were killed on the spot and three others were taken hostage.
A search to rescue the men was quickly launched. But it soon ground to a halt as lawyers - obeying strict U.S. laws about surveillance - cobbled together the legal grounds for wiretapping the suspected kidnappers.
(Forget for a moment that, under FISA, you can get a retroactive warrant up to 72 hours after the surveillance is in place. That is, officials could have begun surveillance, and then gotten the warrant.)
According to a TPM source, it was DoJ incompetence that was responsible for the delay:
But the source, who is privvy to the timeline of the incident, says "internal bureaucratic wrangling," and not court-based restrictions, were responsible for the lag time. "To get an emergency warrant, you just have to believe the facts support the application that someone is an agent of a foreign power," the source says. "That takes approximately five seconds to establish if you're going after an Iraqi insurgent."
Why did so much time elapse before the surveillance? Top Justice Department officials needed to approve the emergency order. But according to the source, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was out of town; Deputy AG Paul McNulty had resigned already; Solicitor General Paul Clement "had left the building"; and the other responsible official, Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Wainstein was not yet authorized to approve the emergency order. Wainstein testified today, but demurred from answering questions about the incident in open session.
The Bushies are using their own incompetence to push for more powers.
Rehberg today waxed poetic about the U.S. Constitution:
The framers of our Constitution created a document that has withstood the test of time, and their shadow continues to be a constant presence in the work I'm doing in Washington, D.C., on behalf of Montana. This week, let us all pay homage and remember those who first sacrificed in order to give us what we have today.
Pogie reminded us what kind of work Rehberg has been doing to the Constitution in Washington DC. Domestic spying, suspension of habaeus corpus, torture, you name it, Dennis has been there.
For the very people who have stripped the Constitution of its core protections to wax poetic about it is pretty shameful. History will show how craven this President and his lap dogs in Congress were, by simple comparison. The men who wrote the Constitution did so when we were incredibly vulnerable, a weak semi-nation threatened by any number of European powers. Yet threatened as they were, they upheld the principles of liberty in the face of incredible odds. For member of government in the most powerful country that has ever existed to lack that courage is shameful and weak.
The Constitution is more than rhetoric and letters to the editor, Congressman.
Wow. Did you see that the Senate approved a bill that allows the President to wiretap without a warrant? I want to investigate the bill, its parameters, and our delegation's stance on the changes before I comment extensively, but my initial reaction is that we've all been betrayed.
Needless to say, there goes Congress' strongest argument for impeachment, that's he's violated the law by wiretapping without a warrant. So much for accountability and the rule of law.
Evan Bayh (IN)
Tom Carper (DE)
Bob Casey (PA)
Kent Conrad (ND)
Dianne Feinstein (CA)
Daniel Inouye (HI)
Amy Klobuchar (MN)
Mary Landrieu (LA)
Blanche Lincoln (AK)
Claire McCaskill (MO)
Barbara Mikulski (MD)
Bill Nelson (FL)
Ben Nelson (NE)
Mark Pryor (AK)
Ken Salazar (CO)
Jim Webb (VA)
I'm relieved to see Max' and Jon's names absent from that list. Thank you, Montana Senators. You did the right thing.
So I'm in Seattle for the weekend and just peeking at the news, but I did see this little item on the front page of the Seattle Times: "Inslee leading effort to impeach Gonzalez."
The good:
[Washington] Rep. Jay Inslee will introduce a resolution today directing the House Judiciary Committee to investigate whether Attorney General Alberto Gonzales should be impeached.
Five co-sponsors have joined Inslee, D-Bainbridge Island, in backing the resolution....
Inslee and his co-sponsors are all former prosecutors. Inslee prosecuted cases for the city of Selah, Yakima County, while working as a private attorney in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
"Our resolution follows the careful procedure of conducting a thorough investigation before the House would decide on articles of impeachment - a fairness the attorney general did not afford to his fired U.S. attorneys," Inslee said Monday.
Great news. Let's get to work on restoring the public's confidence in government, starting with Alberto Gonzalez, perhaps the worst Attorney General the country's seen, who actively worked to give the White House unprecented powers to imprison and torture anyone it wants without any oversight, and who oversaw the politizitation of the rule of law in the country.
The bad:
Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the ranking Republican on the committee, denounced the resolution Monday night.
"The call by Democrats to impeach Attorney General Gonzales is a misuse of congressional power for purely political reasons and a waste of the American public's money and time," Smith said in a statement.
He said Democrats have chosen "to engage in a politically motivated campaign to slander the Justice Department and undermine the credibility of federal law enforcement."
I don't how these people sleep at night saying sh*t like this. There's no reasonable defense of Gonzalez' performance. Period. At best you could argue he was a moron who had no idea of what was going on in his department. And there's plenty of evidence to suggest that he's much, much worse than that. Smith is putting party over country.
Bush administration officials unveiled a bold new assertion of executive authority yesterday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege.
Basically, the administration is boldly saying he'll never let his "loyal Bushies" investigate his activities.
Legal experts are taken aback. Congress' only action -- which is also its best option -- is to use its inherent contempt powers, which allows it to hire its own special counsel. Mark Keiman details other possible steps, including seizure of documents, and arrest of administration officials by Congress' Seargeants-at-Arms, or cutting off funding for the DoJ and other administration bureaucracies.
Like Tester, Montana Senator Max Baucus supports the restoration of habeas corpus for all those detained by the United States, according to his office.
Hopefully, Bob Geiger will be updating his post to let folks know that this bill is supported by Montana's Senators...
A loud shout-out goes to Sens. Baucus and Tester. You're doing the right thing.
Bob Geiger has been collecting the names of Democratic Senators co-sponsoring S.185, the bill that would restore habeas corpus, the "fundamental right of due process under the law to those in American custody."
Jon Tester and Max Baucus are not sponsors of the bill.
According to Geiger, it's not enough to simply support the bill, or to vote for it, sponsorship is vital:
Does it matter if they sign on as cosponsors to the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act of 2007? Yes, it does. For one, it tells us what our running vote count is and gives us some sense of who's going to ultimately vote for it. While the Senators listed above may very well intend on voting for the bill's passage, we don't know that at the moment -- and for something this fundamental to American values, they need to stand up and be counted. Cosponsoring the bill also demonstrates leadership on this vital issue and that's what we want to see.
I don't happen to agree. As long as it passes, I don't care who sponsors it.
That said, Jon Tester supports S.185 and intends to vote for it, according to his office.
No word from Max yet. (Which is my fault, not Max'. I just got off my inquiry now.)
So it's almost been 48 hours since I posted a hit piece against Cindy Sheehan about trying to force the Democratic party on impeachment and the ensuing fracas with commenter Kate over the politics of the situation, and I admit I'm coming around on the impeachment issue. Thanks to last night's Bill Moyers segment on impeachment, I'm getting swayed.
To me it's a clash between the practical -- that is, getting 66 Senators to convict Bush of high crimes and misdemeanors -- and the necessary, the preservation of constitutional checks and balances and the rule of law, and to establish the precedent that the executive branch shall not take powers not granted it by the Constitution or the by the people through their elected representatives in Congress.
