It’s really a GQ, but I can’t see how it won’t become politicized, so might as well be in GD from the outset.
Assume congress decides that the Attorney General really needs to resign. But he doesn’t, and the president won’t push for it.
Could congress pass a bill, that say funded the Iraq war (without deadlines) by taking all funding from the Department of Justice, leaving Gonzales as Secretary of Nothing?
I’m thinking legally here, not if they have the votes in the senate.
Should they?
Of course, Congress can refuse to appropriate funds for any goverment agency. Without such funds, the agency couldn’t pay its bills. Congress could even appropriate funds for DoJ but stipulate that such funds could not be used to pay the AG’s salary.
In order to de-fund DoJ, Congress really has to do nothing. DoJ (like other agencies) must be funded every year with an appropriations bill. Congress can simply refuse to pass such a bill and not pass any resolution that has funds for it.
Yeah, Congress can pretty much do what it wants with respect to funding the Department of Justice, so long as the votes exist to pass the bill and override a presumed veto. (I’m speaking in terms of a bill that would immediately stop the operations of the department, which is funded through September 30, 2007, after which point Congress would have to act to allow the DOJ to have any money at all.)
Of course, then all prosecutions of suspected criminals would stop, the FBI would not show up to work, etc. It would be entirely possible to eliminate the budget for the office of the Attorney General so that Gonzales would have no aides except the various Assistant Attorney Generals (ie, the heads of the civil rights division, criminal division, etc). Imagine a head of a government department who doesn’t even have someone to answer his phones or change the water bottle in his office!
Of course, the easier course (bearing in mind the veto thing) would be to impeach the AG.
Sure. In fact Jimmy Carter’s Zero Based Budgeting system was based on the ability of Congress to appropriated money however it chooses within constitutional limits. Each Congress would go through all of the federal departments, bureaus and the like each budget cycle and decide which to fund.
Do we fund the Department of Defense this year? How about the Interior Department? Etc.
Fortunately the idea immediately sank without leaving a trace.
If they tied it to no-timetable war funding a veto could be spun as “We gave him everything he asked for, but apparently keeping Al-ber-TOE around was more important than supporting the troops.”
How dare you to even utter the I word!!
Impeach Attorney General Alberto Gonzales? Just because in the hearing today, he
Invoked his amnesia defense (I can’t recall," “I don’t remember,” etc.) only 174 million times?
Demonstrated almost total ignorance of what his Chief of Staff was doing in the Attorney firings?
Could not in any way explain how the fired US Attorneys got on the list in the first place?
Absolutely insisted that Carol Lam knew she was in deep shit because her immigration convictions were way down (although Kyle Sampson and Ms Lam herself testified under oath that no one in DOJ ever told her there was any problem whatsoever with her office at all)?
Oh Ravenman, you’re so hard to please. 
It’s not necessary to pass a bill and a veto is not even a consideration. Comgress merely does not pass any appropriation bill that provides funds for the DoJ.
Whereupon the President vetos appropriations bills that he doesn’t like, and generally makes it a pain for Congress to do its job. Not to mention that the basic statutes that create the Dept. will still be on the books. A monumental pissing match, that. 
Let him. It’s already a pissing match so nothing is lost.
:rolleyes: Christ. Why don’t you read what I wrote. The part in the parentheses right after you stopped your quote. Presumably if Congress is really riled up about Gonzales, it will not want to wait five months and ten days to stick it to him.
Ah, by defund you meant to take back the money that’s already been appropriated. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
I’m not sure that Congress can do that. It would be real mess. A lot of the appropriated money has probably been committed to organizations outside DoJ such as contracts, investigations already underway and the like. Sorting it all out so that you knew exactly which funds in the general appropriations bill you could rescind might take months.
In any case, you got me on the same page as you were.
Otto von Bismarck ran into something similar to this, where the Reichstag refused to fund the government anymore because of political clashes with him. His answer was to continue to collect taxes and to continue to fund the government.
While obviously Prussia had a far different political system than us, it’s not entirely different, the executive here is also responsible for collecting taxes, Congress appropriates funds, but it doesn’t actually “have the money.” Theoretically if both branches wanted to get crazy, the President could pull a Bismarck–Bismarck got away with it because the Kaiser supported him, and in Prussia that was really the final say. In the United States for such a thing to happen, people would have to be willing to let the President do something which he has no authority to do without trying to stop him. There’s some precedent for that (ala Andrew Jackson.)
Obviously we’re talking about totally unrealistic scenarios, because Congress refusing to fund the DoJ isn’t very realistic. Budget arguments have happened, as well as government shutdowns, but government shutdowns in the United States in the past haven’t shut down essential services. The 1995 shutdown, Federal prison workers still went to work, military members still went to work, Veteran’s benefits were still mailed (new applications for benefits were not processed), Amtrak still ran (and was, of course, not used), mail would still be delivered and et cetera.
Well, the constitution does say that no money shall be drawn from the treasury except pursuant to an appropriation by Congress. You would have to find someone who would sign the checks which, in this administration might be possible.
As I said, my above scenario would be about as clear-cut an example of a President behaving outside his constitutional authority as one could imagine :).
Carrying your scenario to the end, here is a list of DOJ federal agencies that would go unfunded:
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)
Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (BCBP)
Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
Office of Immigration Statistics
From a practical standpoint, Congress is not going to refuse to fund the DoJ, because the political fallout of not funding a whole department of the federal government is way to great. Why don’t we debate something a little more serious and a little less simply a Democratic dream? 
Not a problem. 
The canceling of appropriated funds is called a rescission and it is pretty common – though not on such a scale. If, for example, a government program has been appropriated $10 million and it completes its objectives under budget at $8 million, it would not be at all out of the ordinary for Congress to put a provision in an appropriations bill rescinding $2 million and putting it toward a different purpose.
Oh sure. The point of my post, that I apparently didn’t make clear, was that the money that has already been committed to outside organizations, such as by contract, can’t be rescinded in total. I suppose you could rescind all of it that the organization hadn’t already spent and you would have to give them their expected profit. In any case, rescision on the scale of the whole Iraq war would take a lot of time to write a law that wouldn’t be immediately challenged by people claiming to have lost money on account of it.