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By Lynn Sweet
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Posted: 03/14/07 06:58 PM [ET] |
The uproar over the Bush White House’s firing of eight U.S attorneys might never have been heard if Congress were not in the hands of Democrats. It’s an example — along with the Walter Reed debacle — for the Bush administration of what it is like when it has to deal with real congressional oversight.
“I can tell you it is highly unlikely that there would have been a serious inquiry into this dismissal if Congress had not changed hands,” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) told me Tuesday. The matter, he said, would have been “swept under the rug.”
It’s hard to imagine that the Justice Department, under a GOP-controlled Congress, would have felt compelled to release the e-mails detailing the thought process behind the firings. The department might just have said the White House was exercising its prerogative over appointees who serve at the pleasure of the president, and that would have been that.
The whole controversy swirling over the dismissals is rooted in part in the GOP-controlled 109th Congress. Recall that for most of that time Republican leaders marched lockstep with the Bush administration. They rarely exercised significant congressional oversight — the Katrina mess perhaps being an exception..
Former White House counsel Harriet Miers and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in a sense got a green light to consider the firings because of what Durbin called a “minor obscure provision” in the Patriot Act reauthorization that would have gotten around confirmation roadblocks Democrats might have been expected to erect.
Slipped into the measure by GOP negotiators who shut Democrats out of the room was a provision that handed the attorney general a new power — the ability to appoint federal prosecutors without the need for Senate confirmation.
“That went unnoticed,” said Durbin, “but cleverly was part of the bigger strategy we now know.”
House Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) started raising questions when the first firings began to surface at a time when it was not clear there would be, in the end, eight dismissals and a call from some Democrats for Gonzales to resign.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) and Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), a member of the panel’s Subcommittee on Courts, put pressure on Gonzales back in January after San Diego-based U.S. Attorney Carol Lam was forced to resign.
Now Democratic leaders are intent on getting Karl Rove, Bush’s top political adviser, Miers and possibly others in front of House and Senate committees. The questions are basic, said Durbin. “How high up did this go? How far along did it go in the White House? Did it go beyond Karl Rove? How much did the president know about this, if anything?”
Durbin expects that the White House will likely refuse to allow Rove to testify. There will be a claim that he is immune from testifying before Congress. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) has said Rove does not qualify for executive branch immunity — the Dem view is it only belongs to the president.
If Rove resists, Durbin said, “I think he is going to find himself in trouble.”
Sweet is the Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times. E-mail:
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