Conservative columnist Bob Novak writes, on the continuation below, about how incompetent the White House, the Attorney-General (Alberto Gonzales), and by implication, the United States now appears, in a world where appearance is reality, not only figuratively, but literally.
We're being led by idiots.
This has produced a few legal issues.
The Scooter Libby obstruction of justice prosecution convicted Libby, but condemned his boss, Vice-President Dick Cheney.
There's only so much dirt you can heap on the underlings before one begins to wonder about the top dog, George W.
How did he get so bad?
How has he made us look so bad?
He is surrounded by people who feel, instead of think.
And why not? Does the president think? Feel first, think later, seems to be his operating principle.
Law is a thinking profession, as much as a feeling one. We expect our judges and top executives to think, or to find people who can do it for them in areas where they're not expert, and then to pay some attention to the advice, especially in the more technical areas.
Is that happening?
The reason for the firing of the eight federal prosecutors appears to be that they were insufficiently loyal 'Bushies.'
Prosecuting is a technical function encased in a political wrapper, like a steamed pork bun in a dim sum restaurant, without tasting as good. Good prosecutors are in touch with the better of the American values. They go after the bad guys while insuring that the separate issue of the way it is done is properly looked after, the latter being called due process of law, which I suppose you knew.
Gonzales never tried a case in his life, or at least I never heard that he did. I did hear that he worked for this large and influential Texas law firm, Vinson & Elkins, of which Daddy Bush was an important client. Any time your client is the president of the United States, he's an important client, no matter who you are.
While there, the client's son, George W., latched onto Alberto Gonzales. It is good when running for office, such as governor of Texas, to have a Mexican-American, supporting you. So they scratched each others back. George W. became governor of Texas and put Alberto G. on the Texas Supreme Court. George W. became president and made Alberto G. the Attorney-General of the United States. George W. almost put both Harriet Miers and Alberto G. onto the Supreme Court. George W. is riding us off a cliff.
As a result, a large part of the country has turned against the war-policy of President George W. Bush. The Democrats have taken control of the House, under Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Sen. Harry Reid, Democrat, of Nevada is now Majority Leader of the Senate. The subpoenas are flying. A top official of the Justice Department, working under Gonzales, today said she'd take the Fifth when called to testify into the firings of the U.S. Attorneys. Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) today accused Gonzales of lying to her when he claimed he had little, if anything, to do with the firings. He was at the meeting when the decision was made, and without his concurrence, it would not have happened. That is the definition of having something to do with the firings. Gonzales lowered the axe lifted by Karl Rove above our prosecutors' necks.
It is amazing to me how much criminal law is practiced at the highest political levels of the land. In my lifetime, Attorney-General John Mitchell (under Nixon) was convicted of criminal activity under Watergate. Vice-president Spiro T. Agnew, under Nixon, was also convicted of criminal activity, accepting bribes as governor of Maryland, as I recall, and forced to resign. Pres. Clinton's assistant Attorney-General, Webster Hubbell, was criminally convicted. Pres. Bush has a criminal lawyer, Jim Sharp, arising out of the Plame-gate investigation out of which the Scooter Libby prosecution grew.
It was said of Pres. Nixon that he took crime off streets...and put it in the White House.
I feel better about my calling, criminal law, mainly, when I see the top officials of the land hiring criminal lawyers. I always knew that my calling was noble, representing the individual in his relationship to the power of the state.
We have a constitutional issue arising out of the conflict between the president, who wants to continue prosecuting the war in Iraq, dispite the terrible consequences to date, with so little to show for the protection of the United States, quite the contrary, in fact, and the House, under Speaker Pelosi, who wants the troops home yesterday, if not sooner.
Who decides a conflict such as this? The Supreme Court? I doubt it.
Why should the Supreme Court get mixed up in a power struggle?
This is a political struggle, a non-justiciable issue, to my thinking.
The winner is the branch of government which has the greatest support among the people, not the Court.
So far, Bush is losing, only he refuses to recognize it.
Pelosi, as I see it, may be winning.
She has the power of the purse.
He has the power to commit troops to battle.
Probably nothing ever written on paper is likely to be able to solve this conflict once and for all.
Our Constitution places the power to declare war in the Congress, per Art. I, Sec. 8, Clause 11.
But it also makes the president Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, per Art. II, Cl. 1.
Well there's a nice little conflict.
When Teddy Roosevelt wanted to show the flag, he sent the Great White Fleet around the world, without an appropriation to pay for the coal. What was Congress going to do, strand the fleet somewhere off the tip of South America? No way. Congress voted to bring the fleet back by appropriating the money to buy the coal to fuel the steam engines. Good old Congress, always supporting the troops when the president puts them in harm's way.
Constitutional issues take time to develop. They arise almost imperceptibly.
Take slavery, for instance. Did slavery cause our civil war?
Slavery existed for thousands of years without causing civil wars.
What caused our civil war was that a few people finally saw the light and realized that one person enslaving another was flat out wrong, no matter what the reason. Soldiers who lost battles were enslaved, as were their wives and children. Talk about your time-honored traditions, this was as old as the hills. Homer sang of the enslavement-to-be of Hector's wife and child, should he lose the hand-to-hand combat with Achilles outside the walls of Troy, which he duly did.
Enslave people of another race? What other race? Blacks were enslaving blacks and selling them to whites. Everyone's hands are dirty, blacks, whites, Christians, Muslims, and who knows, maybe even Jews. America the Beautiful was one of the great slaving nations of all time. Britain, 200 years ago today, enacted legislation abolishing the slave trade. Not slavery, mind you, but buying and selling slaves across the Atlantic. There's a difference. Abolishing the trade frees no slaves. It drives up their value, in fact. But ending the trade was a start, and we must acknowledge starts, despite long runs to the finish if ever there is a finish. There is still slavery in the world.
Slavery didn't suddenly trigger the U.S. Civil War. The war wasn't triggered until a more-or-less anti-slavery man was elected president. When Lincoln was elected, the South walked out in fear of what he might do.
We haven't had a Congress oppose the president on a war since the founding of the nation. When the South seceded, who was left in Congress? Only northern legislators, who supported Lincoln. Congress supported the North and the Civil War, for the most part.
Speaker Pelosi is breaking new American ground, refusing to continue paying for a war that doesn't seem to be working for us.
When did this happen in Britain, the mother country? Under Cromwell? Parliament refusing to appropriate money to suppor the king's war(s)? So the king abolishes (Parliament) for awhile? Until it comes back and refuses to support the war, using the power of the purse.
We wrote this power into our Constitution. The Army appropriation has to be re-voted on each and every two years. Art. I, Sec. 8, Cl. 12. This gives CONGRESS the power to control our wars, not the president, just as Parliament, after the revolution in 1688, at least, controlled British war-fighting, not the king. Our constitutional law is based on the British experience. Pelosi is actually using the power of the purse to rein in a president who seems to have lost the confidence of the majority of the country, but who doesn't want to climb down, any more than Charles I, the fella' who lost his head over this conflict.
We're thus living through a Constitutional crisis without, perhaps, realizing it.
Who is going to win? Congress or the Executive? Pelosi or Bush?
And what about us? When elephants fight, the grass is trampled.
We lost five more American soldiers today, in bombings by suicide bombers and IEDs (improvised explosive devices, i.e. home-made, more-or-less, bombs).
Welcome to Conlaw, it's all around you.
But you have to pay attention, or you may miss it.