The Discerning Texan
-- Edmund Burke
Friday, July 13, 2007
About those "Investigations"
Last night on Special Report with Brit Hume, two hearings in particular came up: the hearings regarding the President's Constitutional authority to hire and fire whichever US Attorneys he damn well pleases, for polititical reasons, for personal reasons, or even if he doesn't like their haircuts; and, the President's Constitutional authority to pardon or commute the sentence of anyone he wishes to. This is not up for discussion: the Constitution grants the President this power, period. So why are we holding hearings discussing it?? Congress has begun spending millions of your tax dollars to hold purely partisan hearings about topics it has no Constitutional authority to "oversee" (emphasis mine):
HUME: There was, of course, also a hearing in the House today on the Scooter Libby sentence commutation, in which the likes of Joe Wilson, whose role in this is well known, testified. Did either of these hearings go anywhere?
KONDRAKE, EXECUTIVE EDITOR, ROLL CALL: No. And, you know, the public looks at Washington and sees nothing getting done. No immigration bill, none of the other problems being solved. But what it does see is more partisan harangues, and this was more partisan haranguing. The Democrats are using their subpoena power to try and their power to hold hearings to try to treat the Bush administration like a pinata.
And, so--and Sara Taylor was the one who got the hits today, and she didn't reveal anything. And they are not going to get anywhere unless the courts say that Executive Privilege does not apply and that these people--
HUME: Is there anything to be gotten?
KONDRAKE: Well, that, we don't know. I mean, they have discovered nothing specifically nefarious that these firings had anything to do with, except, maybe, the failure to prosecute voter fraud cases.
But we done even know--
HUME: The firings were about the failure?
KONDRAKE: Yes.
BILL SAMMON, SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, WASHINGTON EXAMINER: The firings, themselves, are perfectly proper and legal, even if they were about the failure of some political--even if Bush said. Look, I don't like these people for political reasons, I'm going to fire them. There is nothing illegal about that.
There is also nothing illegal about him commuting the sentence of Scooter Libby. So both of these, the problem with these two sets of hearings is that there is no illegality.
These are sort of like fishing expeditions, and I agree with Mort in that it gives the public this impression--and, by the way, it is why the public is holding Congress in the lowest esteem in history, because they are not doing anything except investigating. ...
It is stunts like this which makes my internal conditions so ripe for me to go off on a rant like I did last night. This is beyond partisanship; this is wasting OUR tax dollars strictly for the partisan purposes of one political party. The Democrats are playing with our money for their little game of gotcha.
The sooner we remove these cretins from office, the better.
Labels: Democrat Sabotage, Executive Branch, President Bush, Unbridled Partisanship, US Constitution
