Congress' options: "Inherent contempt" vs. reviving Office of the Independent Counsel

[RTFirefly]

@Martin Hyde

The simple truth of the matter is, firing a U.S. Attorney is an innately executive act, it is improper for Bush to have to divulge information about this act to the Senate or the House sans a compelling interest.

If persons are being prosecuted or not by the U.S. Attorneys, pursuant to whether it stands to bring about partisan gain, that is something the Congress has a compelling interest in. If firings and ‘interim’ replacements of such attorneys are part of a conspiracy to achieve greater electoral success by replacing attorneys who engage in troublesome prosecutions involving Republicans with attorneys who can be counted on to engage in troublesome prosecutions of Democrats, persons who will register likely Democratic voters, or persons who think they legitimately registered to vote but did so in error, Congress has a compelling interest in that: in general, the U.S. attorney program is within their legislative purview.

That interest can’t be, “the Democrats won in '06 and want to embarrass the President.” If I felt there was a genuine investigation that was pursuing a criminal matter, I might feel they had a valid investigation.

Trumped-up criminal prosecutions are a hell of a lot nastier than trumped-up Congressional investigations, even supposing this was one.

This is about one thing, and one thing only, embarrassing the President.

And here I thought it was about keeping our justice system distinct from the sort one finds in banana republics. Silly me.

This is a sham of an investigation being conducted purely out of Democratic spite. The Justice Department has turned over almost 9,000 documents to the Congress during this investigation. When Conyers and his gang couldn’t find anything in that information deluge, they kept fishing, and fishing, and fishing.

You’ll have to explain how a particular subpoena or information request was ‘fishing.’

I realize it’s been awhile since Congressional investigations last took place, but it’s an ancient technique to do a docu-dump in response to a request or subpoena, tossing in all sorts of mostly irrelevant and unresponsive documents for the other side to have to go through, and then saying, “Look, we gave them twenty gazillion documents, isn’t that enough, for chrissake? What more could they want?” So the “9,000 documents” bit doesn’t impress me, nor should it impress you or anyone else in this discussion.

An interesting sidebar is, in 1999 when the Congress wanted to hold Janet Reno in contempt, none other than Congressman Conyers advised that it would be foolish to do so, since no U.S. Attorney would pursue contempt charges. He went on to say that the other option, inherent contempt, would “be an embarrassment to this institution.”

Maybe Congress had a weaker case in that instance. IIRC, that instance had to do with the President’s pardon power, which wasn’t created by legislative act, or is it reviewable by the legislature. If that’s the one you’re referring to, then Congress didn’t have a leg to stand on.