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D.C. Dispatch
July 24, 2007
Both sides deserve to lose the brewing battle between the White House and Congress over executive privilege. 
Are the Democrats Serious?So far, at least, both sides deserve to lose the brewing battle over congressional Democrats' subpoenas for information about White House deliberations on the firings of nine U.S. attorneys. The administration deserves to lose because the contradictory, misleading, and sometimes false congressional testimonies of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other officials about the firings (among other matters) have the smell of cover-up about them. Their evasions have given a tincture of plausibility to what initially seemed to be far-fetched suspicions that the firings were driven by an administration scheme to abuse its prosecutorial powers to hurt Democratic candidates. This is not the best time for the compulsively secretive George W. Bush to hide behind the same executive privilege that the Watergate cover-up made famous, while implausibly claiming to be doing it for the benefit of future presidents. "Presidents who really care about executive privilege and secrecy don't make the claims about confidentiality and evading legal rules wantonly and libidinously," asserts Neal Katyal, a Georgetown law professor who served in the Clinton Justice Department and later criticized President Clinton for misusing executive privilege to shield himself. The congressional Democrats deserve to lose because they have so far made no serious proposal to pass new legislation or to do anything else-besides beat their chests in righteous rage-that shows a genuine need for whatever information they might obtain about the firings by demanding White House documents and the testimony of former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and political aide Sara Taylor. But the Democrats could change this equation by showing that their subpoenas have a legislative goal that transcends embarrassing President Bush. One small step in this direction would be for the Democrats to propose a law making it a crime to do in the future what they suggest the administration may have done in the past: to bring or solicit the bringing (or the timing) of a criminal prosecution for the purpose of partisan advantage. An inquiry into whether such a law is needed might justify forcing full disclosure of all evidence bearing on whether any U.S. attorneys were fired for resisting political pressure to prosecute Democrats. (It would be a stretch to call such conduct a crime under current law, unless the politically motivated prosecutions were aimed at demonstrably innocent defendants.) Such a legislative proposal would also show that the Democrats were willing to risk enshrining in the criminal law a neutral principle that could come back to haunt the next Democratic administration if it plays political games with its prosecutorial power. A more dramatic way for House Democrats to show seriousness would be to push their innuendoes that Gonzales has lied to Congress to the logical conclusion of initiating a formal inquiry into whether he has committed impeachable offenses. Such an inquiry would show a need to obtain all relevant evidence by overriding executive privilege. I am not accusing Gonzales of impeachable offenses. Have his multiple misleading and sometimes false statements to Congress been deliberate lies? Or mere manifestations of the cloddish inability to play big-league ball that has long been Gonzales's trademark? Darned if I know. That's why I argued in my May 5 column not for impeaching Gonzales but for censuring him. To be sure, that column predated exposure of the misleading nature of Gonzales's April 27, 2005, statement to Congress that "there has not been one verified case of civil-liberties abuse" under the USA PATRIOT Act. Still, he seems less a Nixonian villain than a nice man in the wrong job. But if congressional Democrats really think that Gonzales has given deliberately false testimony-which would be both a crime and an impeachable offense-they should say so, and act accordingly. Stuart Taylor Jr. is a senior writer and columnist for National Journal and a contributing editor at Newsweek. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C.
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