Chalk one up for the good guys……

ALBERT EINSTEIN is said to have described insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. The Bush administration would be wise to take heed of these words.

Obsessed with stretching the limits of executive power, the administration has time and again engaged in legal battles or unilateral action in defense of warped interpretations of the law. Time and again, it has been rebuffed by conservative and liberal judges alike. The result: The administration has trampled on the rule of law, and the backlash against its actions has whittled away at the foundations of legitimate executive power.

The latest example is the thorough, thoughtful and devastating opinion issued yesterday by Judge John D. Bates of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which eviscerates the administration’s arguments for refusing to allow former White House counsel Harriet Miers to appear before Congress about the firing of nine U.S. attorneys. The House Judiciary Committee brought suit to enforce its subpoena of Ms. Miers after failing to reach a compromise with the White House over documents and witnesses. In his 93-page decision, Judge Bates concludes that the White House had no legal basis for its position and that Ms. Miers is bound by the subpoena to attend a congressional hearing. Once sworn in, Ms. Miers may still attempt to invoke executive privilege; whether she is justified or not could be a matter for future litigation.

Judge Bates, by the way, is no knee-jerk liberal: He’s an Army veteran, a former prosecutor, a former deputy independent counsel in the Whitewater investigation of President Bill Clinton and a 2001 appointee of President Bush.

Full editorial at the Washington Post

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Rove flips everyone in the House Judiciary subcommittee the bird today… and the tears rolled. It was said the bawling could be heard clear to Connecticut.

A contempt of Congress vote is possible next week, but only if a set of balls (or spine) can be found among members by that time.

Ex-White House Aide Rove Fails to Appear at U.S. House Hearing

July 10 (Bloomberg) — Former White House political director Karl Rove, defying a subpoena, failed to appear before a U.S. House panel investigating whether the Justice Department prosecuted people for political reasons.

Rove’s action today prompted the House Judiciary subcommittee to rule that his reasons for skipping the appearance weren’t valid, setting up a possible contempt of Congress vote next week.

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Mean’spirited? No…..that’s just them doing their jobs. I know it’s been awhile since you’ve witnessed that….but that’s what they’re there for. Maybe your candidates decline because they have something to hide.

Full article at Yahoo

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From Firedoglake:

Last week, I detailed a bit of the background information that I have heard on the Southwick nomination to the 5th Circuit, and the SJC vote that allowed the nomination out of committee. After the piece went up here, I was contacted by no fewer than five sources - some on the Hill, some with contacts there - all of whom were telling me a very similar tale.

The story is this: Pat Leahy got snookered by Arlen Specter, into delaying the vote on Southwick so that the GOP leadership could work on Dianne Feinstein by playing to her ego. And Leahy fell for it - even though he had the votes to shut down the Southwick vote altogether back in July.

Why didn-t the SJC simply vote then, knowing that they could stop the Southwick nomination entirely? No clue. Really…no freaking clue.

Read more »

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by John Nichols
The Nation

Facing the prospect of increasingly aggressive congressional inquiries into his politicization of the Department of Justice, as well as an energetic House push for his impeachment, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has announced that he will resign effective September 17.

Gonzales, the former White House counsel who made clear during his two-and-a-half-year tenure as the nation’s top cop that he served President Bush rather than the Constitution, announced his exit strategy just days before the Congress returns from a summer break during which senators and representatives had gotten an earful about the need to get rid of Gonzales.

A proposal by Washington Democrat Jay Inslee, a respected former prosecutor, to have the House Judiciary Committee investigate whether Gonzales should be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, attracted 27 cosponsors during the current recess and would have drawn many more with the return of the House in early September.

The Attorney General was ripe for impeachment — or, at the very least, the censure proposed by U.S. Senator Russ Feingold, D-Wisconsin — because of a rapidly broadening recognition that Gonzales had displayed a blatant disregard for the law since his arrival in Washington in 2001 at the side of his longtime friend and political benefactor George Bush.

“Alberto Gonzales was the ‘Enabler General’ for the imperial Bush presidency,” said People For the American Way President emeritus Ralph G. Neas upon learning of the Attorney General’s decision. “He undermined the Constitution, made a mockery of the rule of law, and turned the Justice Department into an arm of the Bush Administration’s political operation.

Gonzales, whose signature line was a declaration that he served “at the pleasure of the president,” made it his business as White House Counsel and Attorney General to do just that

.

read more HERE

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By BEN FELLER

WASHINGTON - President Bush is expected to claim executive privilege to prevent two more White House aides from testifying before Congress about the firings of federal prosecutors.

Thursday is the deadline for Karl Rove, Bush’s top political adviser, to provide testimony and documents related to the firings, under a subpoena from the Senate Judiciary Committee. Also subpoenaed was White House political aide J. Scott Jennings. The Justice Department included both men on e-mails about the firings and the administration’s response to the congressional investigation.

White House Counsel Fred Fielding has consistently said that top presidential aides - present and past - are immune from subpoenas and has declared the documents sought off-limits under executive privilege.

The House Judiciary Committee already has approved a contempt citation against two other Bush confidants, chief of staff Josh Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers. The full House is expected to vote on the citation in the fall, but the Justice Department has said it won’t prosecute the two.

Sara Taylor, the former White House political director, appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month and sought to answer some lawmakers’ questions and remain mum on others, citing Bush’s claim of privilege.

read more HERE

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by Jim Swanson

Since President Bush has ordered Harriet Miers NOT to testify tomorrow, (and since when do men order women to do anything?), The House of Representatives has a great way to put an end to this B.S. It’s called “Inherent Contempt“.

And just what is “Inherent Contempt?”

Under this process, the procedure for holding a person in contempt involves only the chamber concerned. Following a contempt citation, the person cited for contempt is arrested by the Sergeant-at-Arms for the House or Senate, brought to the floor of the chamber, held to answer charges by the presiding officer, and then subject to punishment that the House may dictate (usually imprisonment for punishment reasons, imprisonment for coercive effect, or release from the contempt citation.)

Concerned with the time-consuming nature of a contempt proceeding and the inability to extend punishment further than the session of the Congress concerned (under Supreme Court rulings), Congress created a statutory process in 1857. While Congress retains its “inherent contempt” authority and may exercise it at any time, this inherent contempt process was last used by the Senate in 1934, against the Postmaster-General. After a one-week trial in the Senate floor (presided by the Vice-President of the United States, acting as Senate President), the Postmaster-General was found guilty and sentenced to 10 days imprisonment.

The Postmaster General had filed a petition of Habeas Corpus in federal courts to overturn his arrest, but after litigation, the US Supreme Court ruled that Congress had acted constitutionally, and denied the petition in the case Jurney v. MacCracken, 294 U.S. 125 (1945).

In other words, The House finds Harriet in contempt, they tell the Sgt. at Arms, who gets the police, who gets Miers, who has a mini-trial in the House immediately, who then goes to jail.

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Another one bites the dust…….why? If they did nothing wrong, why are they jumping ship?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An assistant attorney general at the Justice Department announced her resignation on Friday, becoming the seventh official to quit the department since the Democratic-led Congress launched an investigation in March into the firing of nine federal prosecutors.

Rachel Brand, assistant attorney general for legal policy, said she would step down on July 9. No reason was given.

Brand was nominated to her position on March 29, 2005, and confirmed by the Senate four months later.

She was responsible for preparing Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito for their confirmation hearings and helped in the reauthorization in 2006 of the USA Patriot Act, an anti-terrorism law that Congress approved after the September 11 attacks.

Last week, President George W. Bush’s nominee for the third-ranking Justice Department post withdrew his name just days before a Senate committee was to hold a hearing on his nomination.

More Boston.com

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Oh gee…..wonder how they’ll rule.

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Friday to review whether Guantanamo Bay detainees may go to court to challenge their indefinite confinement.

The action was announced without comment along with other end-of-term orders.

Last week, lawyers for the detainees filed a statement from a military lawyer in which he described the inadequacy of the process the administration has put forward as an alternative to a full review by civilian courts.

In February, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld a Bush administration law that stripped federal courts of their ability to hear the detainees’ challenges to their confinement.

On April 2, the Supreme Court denied the detainees’ request to review the February decision. The detainees then petitioned the court to reconsider its position.

Dismissing the petitions would be “a profound deprivation” of the prisoners’ right to speedy court review, lawyers for the detainees said.

Read more here

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Like I’ve said, we are stuck with Alito and Roberts…..atleast for my lifetime. This is something every voting person should think about when voting for a president, or a congress person. It scares the crap out of me that we are stuck with these two liars. Yesterday’s decision shows just what direction they will take this country in.

OPINION From the LA Times:

By Erwin Chemerinsky, ERWIN CHEMERINSKY teaches law and political science at Duke University Law School.
June 29, 2007

THE SUPREME COURT term that ended Thursday confirmed exactly what many people had feared: that the testimony given by John Roberts and Samuel Alito at their confirmation hearings just months earlier was a lot of baloney.

During those hearings, the two presented themselves as open-minded jurists lacking an ideological agenda. Roberts likened a Supreme Court justice to an umpire, a neutral arbiter whose personal political views are irrelevant to decisions. Both Roberts and Alito promised fidelity to the court’s precedents.

But instead, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito have behaved exactly as their opponents predicted. There was not one case this term in which the court was not ideologically divided, and not one in which Roberts and Alito did not vote for the result that their conservative backers would have wanted. In virtually all of these cases, they were joined by justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas.

The result was the most overwhelmingly conservative term since the 1930s. Ever since Richard Nixon ran for president in 1968, conservatives have been striving for a reliable majority voting as a bloc across all areas of the law - and this year they finally got it.

Read more »

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I’ve been going over roll calls for confirmations and certain bills. We truly can’t hold the Dems accountable for the confirmations of Roberts, Alito or Gonzales. Roberts was a close one, with 22 Dems voting to confirm, but even if the 22 had voted against confirmation, he would have been confirmed. Gonzales only got 6 Democrats to vote for him. 3 Dems didn’t vote. Alito had only 4 Democrats vote for him.

But now, we can hold you accountable. 1/2 the Senate needs to vote in favor to confirm. You hold half the Senate. You better be there and you better vote NAY on this one!!! Oh, and next time they are up for re-election, we can hold to account the Democrats that did vote yes to give us the rightwing Supreme Court we now have, and will be stuck with for years to come. You can find the vote roll calls here.

Hans von Spakovsky is among the GOP hacks who perverted the U.S. Department of Justice - trashing constitutional principles, rewarding partisanship over competence and converting the entire machinery into an arm of the Republican Party. His specialty was suppressing voting by Americans of color, who are more likely to support Democrats; he played a starring role in a nationwide effort to disenfranchise poor blacks, Latinos and Native Americans.

Now, Mr. von Spakovsky is seeking Senate approval for a six-year term on the Federal Election Commission, which enforces federal campaign finance laws. (President Bush gave Mr. von Spakovsky a recess appointment in January 2006, but he must have Senate confirmation for a full term.) The vote ought to be easy: No, no and no way.

A group of former Justice Department professionals - including a former chief of the Civil Rights Division’s Voting Section - have stepped forward to oppose his nomination. According to The Washington Post, more than half the career lawyers in the Voting Section left in protest during his tenure.

Mr. von Spakovsky’s blatant disregard for the constitutionally guaranteed right to the franchise should disqualify him from even serving as a volunteer poll worker, much less a commissioner on the FEC. He is a leading light among the Republican activists who have whipped up the bogeyman of fraudulent voting, claiming that illegal ballots can only be stopped by stringent requirements, such as state’sponsored photo IDs, at the ballot box.

Actually, illegal voters are about as common as honest Bush appointees in the Justice Department.

More at the Baltimore Sun

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This just goes along with everything else that’s wrong with this administration and judicial system.

BALTIMORE –Decisions by judges in the Coast Guard’s administrative court system almost always favor the agency over civilian mariners, according to a newspaper’s review of court records and other documents.

One former judge testified that judges were pressured to side with the Coast Guard, The Sun of Baltimore reported Sunday.

The agency’s administrative court system handles charges against tugboat captains, engineers, charter fishermen and others who need licenses or other documents from the Coast Guard to work. The harshest penalty in the system is revocation of those credentials.

Mariners have won just 14 cases out of more than 6,300 charges filed by Coast Guard investigators since 1999, when the agency restructured its judicial system to broaden defendant’s rights, the paper said it found through a computer analysis of court records.

In a sworn statement, Judge Jeffie J. Massey has testified that Chief Judge Joseph N. Ingolia told her to always rule in the Coast Guard’s favor, and she said she came under intense pressure when she did not, the newspaper said.

“I was specifically told (by Ingolia) that I should always rule for the Coast Guard,” Massey said. “He said, ‘The Coast Guard are out there keeping our seas safe and we have to do everything we can to support them. They know when to bring these cases and we’re just supposed to help them.’”

More at Boston.com

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All roads back to Rove……..

Several high-ranking White House officials were closely involved in crafting a public response to the uproar over the firing of a group of U.S. attorneys, according to documents released late yesterday.

Then-White House counsel Harriet E. Miers and aides to presidential adviser Karl Rove were deeply enmeshed in debates over how to respond to the controversy as early as mid-January, when Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) questioned the spate of prosecutor departures in a Senate floor speech, according to e-mails that the Justice Department turned over to the House and Senate judiciary committees.

The e-mails are the latest documents to surface among the thousands of pages provided to Congress in last year’s firing of nine U.S. attorneys. Their ouster has prompted a series of investigations and led to a failed effort Monday by Senate Democrats to stage a vote of no confidence in Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.

The new records provide a peek at the actions of the White House, which has repeatedly refused Democratic demands for records and sworn testimony related to the issue.

More at the Washington Post

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ZINIE CHEN SAMPSON, Associated Press Writer

RICHMOND, Va. - The Bush administration cannot legally detain a U.S. resident it believes is an al-Qaida sleeper agent without charging him, a divided federal appeals court ruled Monday. The court said sanctioning the indefinite detention of civilians would have “disastrous consequences for the constitution - and the country.”

In the 2-1 decision, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel found that the federal Military Commissions Act doesn’t strip Ali al-Marri, a legal U.S. resident, of his constitutional rights to challenge his accusers in court.

It ruled the government must allow al-Marri to be released from military detention.

Al-Marri has been held in solitary confinement in the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., since June 2003. The Qatar native has been detained since his December 2001 arrest at his home in Peoria, Ill., where he moved with his wife and five children a day before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to study for a master’s degree.

“To sanction such presidential authority to order the military to seize and indefinitely detain civilians, even if the President calls them ‘enemy combatants,’ would have disastrous consequences for the constitution - and the country,” the court panel said.

Al-Marri’s lawyers argued that the Military Commissions Act, passed last fall to establish military trials after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, doesn’t repeal the writ of habeas corpus - defendants’ traditional right to challenge their detention.

Source: Yahoo News

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despite laws that preclude such considerations Laws damn it….laws. Let’s see something happen because this administration keeps breaking the law!!!

By Amy Goldstein and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers

The Bush administration increasingly emphasized partisan political ties over expertise in recent years in selecting the judges who decide the fate of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, despite laws that preclude such considerations, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.

At least one-third of the immigration judges appointed by the Justice Department since 2004 have had Republican connections or have been administration insiders, and half lacked experience in immigration law, Justice Department, immigration court and other records show.

Two newly appointed immigration judges were failed candidates for the U.S. Tax Court nominated by President Bush; one fudged his taxes and the other was deemed unqualified to be a tax judge by the nation’s largest association of lawyers. Both were Republican loyalists.

Justice officials also gave immigration judgeships to a New Jersey election law specialist who represented GOP candidates, a former treasurer of the Louisiana Republican Party, a White House domestic policy adviser and a conservative crusader against pornography.

Continue reading at the Washington Post

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