Pat Buchanan's view:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/03/rogue_congress.html

If the Senate and House judiciary committees issue subpoenas for Karl Rove and other White House aides to testify to their roles in the firing of the eight U.S. attorneys, President Bush should defy the subpoenas. He should accept the contempt citations and fight it all the way to the Supreme Court.

Indeed, he has a duty to do so. For Bush is today the custodian of an office that is the subject of assault by a partisan and hostile Congress.

This is not about the incompetence of the Justice Department of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales or about any White House role in the firing of the eight -- whom President Bush had every right to fire.

This is about preserving and protecting the integrity of the institution of the presidency. It is about the right of America's head of state and head of government to receive the candid counsel of his most trusted advisers.

If White House assistants as close to a president as Karl Rove is to George W. Bush can be ordered before congressional partisans, to be interrogated by congressional committees on what he may have told the president on controversial matters, the presidency itself will be damaged and weakened.

What is the matter with so many journalists that they cannot see or understand the principle at stake? Is their contempt for Bush so great they cannot see the need for executive privilege? Indeed, the hypocrisy on the part of some in the press is so manifest as to make them look absurdly partisan.

We just passed through a criminal investigation by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald of the alleged outing of a CIA agent, an investigation the press demanded. Yet journalists were outraged that Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matt Cooper of Time were subpoenaed and forced to testify to a U.S. grand jury in that criminal investigation. To defend reporter's privilege, Miller spent months in jail, rather than testify to what a single White House aide told her.

Can journalists credibly argue for an absolute shield law that protects their right never to have to reveal -- even before a federal grand jury that is investigating potential crimes against national security -- what Karl Rove told them, but President Bush has no right at all to protect what Rove told him from a partisan congressional committee?

Congress, too, is being manifestly hypocritical.

When $90,000 was discovered in the freezer of Rep. William Jefferson, the Justice Department went to a federal judge for a subpoena, so the FBI could enter Jefferson's office, where agents removed files related to a corruption investigation. Yet members of Congress were outraged at this executive intrusion in their sacrosanct domain.

No matter that Jefferson was under criminal investigation, no matter that the subpoena was validly issued by a U.S. judge, Capitol Hill was said to be a sanctuary into which no law enforcement agent of the executive branch had a right to intrude.

Journalists make the point that Nixon aides, among them this writer, testified under oath in televised hearings before the Watergate Committee, that President Nixon was ordered by the Supreme Court to turn over tapes of his most confidential Oval Office conversations.

But those tapes were ordered turned over to an independent special prosecutor, whose office had been set up to investigate the White House and prosecute former White House aides. The executive branch was investigating the executive branch.

As for the Senate Watergate Committee, it was a special committee with which President Nixon, after the White House aides involved in the scandal had been removed, had agreed to cooperate. The same was true of President Reagan in the Iran-Contra affair.

In this matter of the eight U.S. attorneys, what do we know? That they were fired by the president at whose pleasure they served. That there is no hard evidence any was fired to abort a criminal investigation. That some were incompetent. That others, like Carol Lam of San Diego, had their own agenda and were not dealing resolutely, as Justice was demanding, with the illegal immigration scandal.

Congress has many powers, among them the right to command the presence and public testimony of every executive branch officer in the Cabinet departments. But Congress has no right, in its oversight function, to command the testimony of a president's closest aides as to what they told the president in confidence, any more than it has a right to the testimony of Supreme Court clerks as to what they told the chief justice.

If Congress presses ahead with these subpoenas, the president should use every weapon in his arsenal to repel this act of aggression by a rogue Congress against the Office of the President of the United States.

quote:

Indeed, he has a duty to do so. For Bush is today the custodian of an office that is the subject of assault by a partisan and hostile Congress.

What a piece of propagandist drivel!

This piece is essentially expressing a value of the Federalist Society, aka, the Hamiltonians, aka, the Federalist Papers, that propounds a "vigorous" president. It's the philosophy of what has become a rogue presidency, not a rogue Congress. What a joke!

Everything we write is a kind of propaganda, because it is laden with values, whether implicit or explicit, and it's value itself that propaganda is trying to instill, not a rational argument. The values implicit in this argument is the value of a strong central leader as opposed to the values of democratic choice expressed by the group. If one understands the basic tensions that were in the struggles to develop the Constitution, one can then see that the tension is still a major struggle in our political system today, and is exemplified in the words of this piece.

The really serious issue as we have been exploring it in the various unitary executive theory threads is whether this Congress can rescue the powers of Congress to check and then balance the powers of the presidency, as this administration has moved beyond a pluralist unitary executive that we saw in the Reagan, Bush I and Clinton administrations towards a presidentialist focused unitary executive. The dangers of that can be seen in the dangers of the Presidential System itself, and a danger that we now see echoed in many areas of our media, increasingly in academic originated writings, and that's a tendency to move towards an ever less checked, hierarchically ordered unilateralism in government, both within the nation and outside in its foreign policy. One common expression of that we've been seeing is the notion of an Imperial Presidency. The end result is to make the Congress increasingly a subserviant rubber stamp for a singular set of values and governance seated in the White House.


If Pat Buchanan actually understands what he's saying, if this opinion piece isn't just doing a typical knee jerk reaction to the actions of a Congress that is now led by a party he himself is generally at odds with, then he is, I would say, a proponant of the latter type of leadership. Need one mention other types of strong leader governments that the U.S. says it's against, even if our foreign policy shows differently? (Iran was a democracy in the fifties and the CIA engineered a coup that imposed the Shaw, for example)

Pat B., what a load of BS.
Every point that is made is from a fascist point of view.

Idiot says......

quote:

This is about preserving and protecting the integrity of the institution of the presidency. It is about the right of America's head of state and head of government to receive the candid counsel of his most trusted advisers.

This is about open government, by the people and for the people.
Of course he has the right to receive candid counsel, but he has already said in news briefings that he had nothing to do with the firings. In that case, executive priviledge would not apply to the AG, since he has already said he was not involved.
Also, the priviledge arguement is for cases of national security, which this is not.


Idiot says........

quote:

In this matter of the eight U.S. attorneys, what do we know? That they were fired by the president at whose pleasure they served. That there is no hard evidence any was fired to abort a criminal investigation. That some were incompetent. That others, like Carol Lam of San Diego, had their own agenda and were not dealing resolutely, as Justice was demanding, with the illegal immigration scandal.

Worst arguement yet.
The people of the United States have the right to know if there is indeed hard evidence that could be damaging, we won't know till it is investigated...
By this idiots logic, ANYTHING Bush does will be under the executive priviledge arguement and no matter what he does illegal or not, will never be prosecuted.

Must be nice to be President and get away with everything.