The silent coup of the neo-cons

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) wants to know if White House officials committed perjury and will be calling Karl Rove to testify in the ongoing US Attorney purge scandal. I love this kind of talk.

“Frankly, I don’t care whether [White House Counsel Fred Fielding] says he’s going to allow people or not. We’ll subpoena the people we want,” Leahy said. “If they want to defy the subpoena, then you get into a stonewall situation I suspect they don’t want to have.” Asked whether he’ll subpoena Rove, Leahy answered, “Yes. He can appear voluntarily if he wants. If he doesn’t, I will subpoena him.”

I wish they could get this fired up about war resolutions but I'll take what I can get and some real oversight over White House malfeasance is long overdue. And after listening to six years and more of how Clinton "deserved" to be impeached for lying about a farookin blow job, I'd really like to see how the wingnuts are going to justify the latest multitude of lies told by officials in this administration.

And speaking of lies, Justice is trying to take the heat off the White House, but it's clear that this trickery was deliberately planned.

Wednesday's explanation of the Patriot Act changes, along with the release of new e-mail correspondence, was meant to stave off mounting accusations by Democrats as their investigation into the administration's firing of the prosecutors widens. Democrats say they now are suspicious that the changes were part of an attempt to grab executive powers and play politics with prosecutorial appointments. They also accused the Justice Department of misleading Congress about the intent of the new law.

In e-mails released earlier this week, Justice Department officials discussed relying on the new powers to get "our preferred person appointed" with "far less deference to home state senators," according to an e-mail by Kyle Sampson, the former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Furthermore, like every other neo-con trick to break down the checks and balances in favor of the unitary executive, this one was clearly planned well in advance.

In telephone interviews, Moschella and Collins both said Collins had floated the idea of taking district judges out of the vacancy-filling process back in 2003, when he was still at Justice. A former assistant U.S. attorney, Collins said the ability of a district court judge to appoint an interim U.S. attorney if the Senate did not confirm a nominee raised constitutional questions about the separation of powers.

It will be interesting to see if anything comes of this in the long run but one thing is perfectly clear. In the six years since 9/11, the terrorists haven't managed to take a single one of our freedoms and why would they even bother to try? The Bush administration has managed to practically destroy our system of government for them.