A
Anonymous
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Finally some more are wakening to the reason I've been saying that GW needs to be challenged and jerked up short on his reign of secrecy and going around or totally avoiding existing laws and the Constitution.....The last paragraph and especially the last sentence sums it up quite well :shock:
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Aug 5, 8:16 PM EDT
More Bush-Congress court fights likely
By CHARLES BABINGTON
Associated Press Writer
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Aug 5, 8:16 PM EDT
More Bush-Congress court fights likely
By CHARLES BABINGTON
Associated Press Writer
The administration repeatedly has rebuffed Congress' efforts to look into wiretaps, energy policy, prosecutors' firings and other matters, while claiming its own right to probe alleged congressional misdeeds. The efforts have been extraordinary, even by the standards set by secretive and combative presidents such as Richard Nixon, some legal scholars say.
"Most people feel this has been the most aggressive executive branch, maybe in the history of the country, in terms of asserting its executive authority," said Carl Tobias, a constitutional law professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia.
The stakes have risen in recent months as the Democratic-controlled Congress began contempt proceedings against some of Bush's top aides and suggested a perjury investigation of his attorney general.
At least some clashes appear headed for court, where judges again will wrestle with a question central to the republic's founding: Where to strike the balance between the executive and legislative branches' powers so that one does not ride roughshod over the other?
"I think you'll find the courts are going to become more involved," Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., a lawyer who is on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in an interview after the court decision Friday. "This administration has a well-deserved reputation for arrogance. I think they just try to believe that they are not susceptible to checks and balances."
Perhaps the action most likely to trigger a showdown over Bush's repeated claims of executive privilege was last month's House committee vote to launch contempt charges against former White House counsel Harriet Miers. Bush has asserted executive privilege in refusing to let her testify in Congress' probe of the firing of several federal prosecutors.
Legal scholars say executive privilege is an imprecise term asserted by several presidents but never fully settled by the courts. The Miers case, some say, could be a good test of how to balance a president's need for private advice against Congress's need to oversee executive branch actions that might include political abuses.
"There will be more courts," Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said Friday. "This administration takes a position that no administration has, certainly since Marbury v. Madison, that somehow they are above the law," he said, referring to the 1803 Supreme Court decision establishing judicial reviews.
Bruce Fein, a Washington lawyer who was an associate deputy attorney general in the Reagan administration, fears Congress is not fighting hard enough to parry Bush's claims of executive privilege.
"The Bush administration is close to reducing Congress to wallpaper, when it comes to oversight, if Congress does not respond" more forcefully, he said.
Republicans, he added, may come to regret the precedents that Bush is asserting.
"I tell my Republican friends that Hillary Clinton will be the president some day," Fein said. "They just don't get it."
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