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This is so much fun. Monica Goodling, who is at the center of the Senate’s investigation of the US Attorney purge publicly stated [through her own lawyer] that she would invoke the 5th amendment if asked questions by the Judiciary Committee. The speculation has been rife ever since about what it is she would prefer not to say since the only reason anyone can invoke their 5th amendment rights is to prevent prosecution for perjury with respect to prior statements. Goodling’s attorney seems to have been fishing for an offer of immunity. But my new hero Patrick Leahy isn’t having any of it. Instead he has sent this nice letter to Ms Goodling’s lawyer: The TPM DOCUMENT COLLECTION – Letter from Senators Leahy and Whitehouse of the Judiciary Committee to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales

How delicious is that!

We have entered new consitutional territory: Leahy says he’d normally seek advice from the Justice Department about how to proceed against soemone invoking the 5th, but in this instance he notes: “The office of the Attorney General appears to hopelessly conflicted.” He then wonder whether Goodling is cooperating with the Attorney general’s internal investigation [that Gonzales started in an attempt to appease Leahy et al], because if she is she has probably compromised her 5th amendment rights.

There’s a big “gotcha!” there.

But there’s more: Leahy also points out his concern that despite Goodling’s lack of cooperation with the Senate she remains on the DoJ payroll.

That’s another “gotcha!”

As I said this is fun. I had never heard of Goodling before this scandal, but what I have subsequently found out really ticks me off: she has no legal experience, she is a ideologue, she is in a position of huge influence, and she is a religious zealot. Strange that someone reportedly so devout and pious doesn’t want to do something simple like help the legal process get at the truth.

But it gets even better!

The House committee is on her trail too! They sent a letter today asking that she appear before them. This is where you can read their letter: House Democrats Letter to Goodling’s Lawyer. The best part of this is the following: “The alleged concern that she may be prosecuted for perjury by the Department of Justice for fully truthful testimony is not only an unjustified basis for invoking the privilege and without reasonable foundation in this case but also so far as we know an unwarranted aspersion against her employer.”

That’s called putting the knife in.

Maybe she is worried about talking because she’s been told they’ll prosecute her if she does?

Hold on people this one’s big, and it’s getting better.

The people of America received help from an unlikely source yesterday: the Supreme Court, stacked as it is with reactionary idealogues, ruled against the administration and effectively in favor of more stringent emissions regulation. The New York Times story is here: Justices Say E.P.A. Has Power to Act on Harmful Gases

Now I admit the justices did not say outright that the EPA ought to regulate emissions more stringently, but that is the real effect of their ruling because they disagreed with the Bush view that the legislation covering the EPA’s duties on emmissions is too limited and, instead, agreed that the EPA can in fact support emissions regulation.

That’s all a bit convoluted, so here’s the simple version: Bush has said since he came into office and overuled the Clinton apporach to regulation that the EPA has no mandate to enforce emissions regulation. He says that there is no specific wording in any law to force the EPA down that road and hence the EPA should cease its activities with regard to matters such as global warming. As a result, during the Bush administration the EPA has been prevented from supporting efforts to reduce greenhouse gases. In fact it has often opposed them. Because of this, a number of states, with California and those in the Northeast in the vanguard, have assumed the responsibility to attack the greenhouse gas probelm themselves. The EPA and the Bush administration have tried, along with industry groups such as the auto makers, to stop this state driven effort. The states sued to be able to continue, and the Supreme Court has found in their favor by saying the EPA does indeed have a mandate in this area, even though there is no explicit legislation saying so.

This is a major setback for Bush and his efforts to cripple the effectiveness of the Federal government. It is also ironic in a couple of ways: the Supreme Court is solidly Republican, and yet it issued a judgement that sides with a whole bunch of more liberal states; and this is a clear instance of the pro-industry rather than states rights approach of Bush. Typically the Republicans would advocate the supremacy of “state’s rights”, but in this case, because their big business backers said so they tried to crush the states.

Consistency and principle are not what they were in the red states!

Anyway: score one for the people, even though it hurts to say thank you to the Supreme Court.

Last week’s testimony by the pip-squeak Kyle Sampson finally convinced me that there may be hope for the good old US of A. I was glued to the television as the Senate went about its slow motion constitutional duty. I admit I found it rivetting. Who knew that Patrick Leahy was such a sly devil? Or that Chuck Schumer was such a street fighter? These guys chewed poor old Kyle up and spat him out in so many pieces that by the end of the day even I had begun to feel sad. He was pathetic. What a servile little creep. He is exactly the kind of twerp that Bush has hired and put in all sorts of places: faithful to a fault, religious zealot, just clever enough to be smarmy, but not clever enough to have any opinions of his own. In short [and he is short] he’s a revolting little excuse for a senior official of the Justice Department.

And just how good an official? We’ll never know because he seems to suffer form the most appalling memory lapses. Every time he was asked a tough question he seemed to have to reach back into the far distant past through some sort of bureaucratic fog that inevitably defeated his earnest attempts to recall what he meant by his actions or words. This was even when someone gave him an aid … like a copy of his own words. This tragic ailment has a remedy however: just get a Republican to ask the questions! Every time a red stater put a question the fog rolled away and Kyle’s perfect recall clicked into action. Presto! Out popped a perfectly formed and well articulted slice of pablum. This was particulalry true when Orrin Hatch, Utah’s finest, was the interlocuter. We are not supposed to mention that Kyle used to work for Hatch, so those perfect answers cannot possibly have been the result of collusion. Can they?

The spectacle brought into sharper focus what is at stake: on the Bush side is the undoing of much of his “imperial presidency”; for six years he was able to act as if Congress did not exist because the Republican leadership there decided never to exert any oversight. On the contrary, they went out of their way to aid and abet a whole series of actions that would have attracted serious objection in a balanced government. The Republicans threw the notion of “checks and balances” out the window, leaving Bush and his crew to devestate the effectiveness of government, trash the constitution, and pile up all sorts of damage to our economy along the way. No one in the Republican ranks [except Chuck Hagel] had the courage to speak out against what will surely go down in history as the single worst administration America has ever had. In contrast, on the Democratic side the ability to get hearings is a weapon they can use to slow Bush down and to begin the painful process of dismantling that self-same imperial executive. Coming from England I am used to conservatives defending the monarchy so it’s no surprise to hear Republicans defending Bush. But the stench of their hypocrisy is everywhere: they were outraged about Clinton’s lying to Congress, but Bush? No he isn’t criticized at all. When Gore used a White House telephone there was outrage. But apparently it’s just fine for Rove and his minions to conduct the nation’s business over the internet [where any self respecting country can spy on it] using the Republican National Committe’s web server … it’s against the law folks, wake up!

When someone like Kyle Sampson is presented as a senior official of the most powerful nation on earth, someone who works in the Jsutice Department, someone who his fans call “super-sharp” turns out to be a mealy mouthed, bureaucratic, know-nothing, paper-pusher we have a problem. As Senator Whitehouse form Rhode Island asked: “Do we have to be worried about the competence of the Justice Department?” Given Kyle’s total lack of any meaningful legal experience and his only skill being his undying fealty to Bush [he called himself a “Bushie” … how cute!] how can we expect him, as one of the top officials in law enforcement in the country, to have a clue? How many other departments of our government are stacked with idiots like Kyle? And how much incompetence is acceptable from all these pychophants before we toss them all out? Before you think I am making too much of Kyle, inspect Monica Goodling’s credentials for her top position: she’s a graduate from a Christian Bible College and did her law degree at Pat Buchanan’s school, she has never tried a case of any size and is one of the people Bush relied on [with Kyle] when he drew up a lsit of underperforming US Attorneys. Or how about the woman in the Wildlife and Fisheries Department who send s official e-mails to her fellow on-line gamers in order to discuss p0olicy matters?

Unfortunately the Katrina mess was exactly what we should have expected from this crowd of fools whose only criterion for selection was loyalty. Don’t forget that when the ill-fated Iraq reconstruction crew was put together the key requirement was not skill or experience, but was whether you voted for Bush and opposed abortion rights.

So low has America fallen that we did not find this all out until after the last eelction and oversight returned in the shape of people like Senators Leahy and Schumer.

Anyone who thinks this is a trivial “partisan fishing expedition” is nuts. This is an attempt to start the climb back to resepctability by a nation that has been royally trashed by an small, extreme, and very nasty crowd of manipulators who plugged up government with loyal fools in order to prevent us, the citizens, from finding out what they were up to. that’s un-American. That’s unpatriotic. And behind it all is Karl Rove. The master manipulator. All roads lead to Rove.

Go get him Leahy!

Folks seem to be really confused as to why this is a big deal. Quite a few of you are repeating the Republican ‘talking point’ that: “Clinton fired all 93, so what’s the big deal about Bush firing 8?”

OK. Listen up and I’ll tell you.

First: it is normal for an incoming President to fire all 93 US Attorneys and then replace them with his/her own people. Everyone does it. Clinton did it and so did George Bush when he first came to power.

Second: it is extremely abnormal to fire anyone mid-term. Research shows that only 10 US Attorneys have been fired mid-term in the past twenty five years and most, if not all, of them were fired for obvious reasons [one of them was fired because he bit the arm of a stripper in a strip club!]. So the current circumstance of a mass firing during mid-term is extremely odd and is bound to engender questions.

Third: those questions are bound to get sharper when it turns out that one of the fired Attorneys [Carol Lam] was working on a nationally prominent corruption case involving several well connected Republican congressmen. That firing alone looks suspicious. In the interests of propriety we need to make sure that Lam was fired for a proper reason and not because she was about to uncover a deeper rooted scandal.

Fourth: the reasons given for the firings are flimsy and have been changed when the public outcry showed that they were a sham. For instance: David Inglesias was fired, according to the Attorney General, because he was not diligent or competent in pursuing immigration cases. Yet it turns out that Inglesias was the most qualified immigration attorney on the staff of the Department of Justice … he was the person they turned to to educate the others on how to do it! It is this kind of clear falsehood that has everyone’s attention.

So the issue is not that the Attroneys were fired, although that in itself is odd, it is why they were fired.

And so far the White House has not felt able or willing to answer that question clearly. The original reasons have all been shredded by simple follow up research. Bush’s attempt to stall for time is a sign that there is more to this story than he wants to tell. For instance: was he personally involved in giving the Ok for the firings? If so was he aware of the reasons? And are those reasons acceptable?

Deliberately employing US Attorneys to do the bidding of the Republican party during a close election is a debasement of our justice system and neeeds to be punished. Lying to Congress is a felony. So far the evidence is mounting that more than one person at the Department of Justice has lied to Congress, and it is beginning to look as if Bush himself was involved in perverting the justice system. [That Bush was involved is suggested by this ‘coincidence’: the infamous 18 day gap in the e-mail trail that all the commentators are pointing to, is precisely the same three weeks period that Bush was either traveling or taking his Thanksgiving holiday; as soon as he arrived back in the White House the e-mail activity started up again, and the Attorneys were fired within days!]

I doubt that impeachment is possible because of the time left in Bush’s term, and the lack of sufficient votes in the Senate. But the offense sure looks impeachable.

So, notwithstanding Fox news and the right wing pundits, this really is a big deal. We need to get to the bottom of it quickly; and, if need be, we need to get those subpoenas out to force testimony from those who can shed a light on what happened.

This is a big deal, and will get bigger the longer Bush tries to stall, and the more the Republicans huff and puff about partisan witch hunts. There’s smoke at the end of that gun barrel. We need to know who pulled the trigger.