White House holds breath and stamps feet
The White House is pouting. Well, actually it's White House counsel Fred Fielding. From The Hill:
Congress needs to enforce its Constitutional rights as an equal branch of government, and if a few delicate flowers in the GOP get their feathers ruffled, so be it. Didn't they ever hear of karma? We didn't invent McCarthyist-Nixonian-Rovian politics, but I think we are catching on about how to deal with it.
Let the Bushies defend their actions in federal court. If it goes to the Supremes, well, we can guess which 5 justices would side with the administration, but at least the American people will see how badly these people have messed up our government.
Presidential counsel Fred Fielding on Monday accused the chairmen of the Senate and House judiciary committees of having already made up their minds to escalate a fight with the White House over access to documents and staffers.It's the classic behavior of bullies everywhere, at every level of society. Republicans who once chortled and gurgled about how politics is a tough game, and gleefully ran around their 2004 convention with purple bandaids to mock John Kerry's war wounds, are now upset about "tone." Well, that's just too bad now, isn't it?
In again denying Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) access to former White House counsel Harriet Miers and an aide to Karl Rove, Sara Taylor, Fielding took issue with the tone that congressional investigators struck in recent correspondence.
“We are troubled to read the letter’s charge that the president’s ‘assertion of executive privilege belies any good faith attempt to determine where privilege truly does and does and does not apply,’” Fielding said in response to a June 29 letter from Leahy and Conyers.
The White House counsel prefaced his response with “a note of concern over your letter’s tone and apparent direction in dealing with a situation of this gravity.”
Congress needs to enforce its Constitutional rights as an equal branch of government, and if a few delicate flowers in the GOP get their feathers ruffled, so be it. Didn't they ever hear of karma? We didn't invent McCarthyist-Nixonian-Rovian politics, but I think we are catching on about how to deal with it.
Let the Bushies defend their actions in federal court. If it goes to the Supremes, well, we can guess which 5 justices would side with the administration, but at least the American people will see how badly these people have messed up our government.
