J's Cafe Nette

After over six years of trying to “get along” with the other side, President Bush has finally been pushed too far.

While the Senate has been demanding the president’s top advisers be subpoenaed and forced to give public testimony under oath the president has offered a compromise that would allow the people the Senate wants to interview to testify in private and not under oath, with no transcripts of the testimony.

Before anyone says this is unfair let’s remember it’s about Executive Privilege and the right of a president to expect candid advice from his advisers. Let us also understand that even though they would not be under oath, it would carry the same weight as being under oath, except with no transcript of the testimony.

It sounds fair enough to me because if you allow a transcript, as sure as I’m sitting here right now, someone on the committee or committee staff is going to leak everything to the major newspapers in this country and frank conversations between the president and his staff will always be in peril for fear of having to testify in public about any matter the Executive Branch has control over.

A defiant President Bush warned Democrats Tuesday to accept his offer to have top aides testify about the firings of federal prosecutors only privately and not under oath or risk a constitutional showdown from which he would not back down.
Democrats’ response to his proposal was swift and firm: They said they would start authorizing subpoenas as soon as Wednesday for the White House aides.

“Testimony should be on the record and under oath. That’s the formula for true accountability,” said Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Bush, in a late-afternoon statement at the White House, said, “We will not go along with a partisan fishing expedition aimed at honorable public servants. … I have proposed a reasonable way to avoid an impasse.”

He added that federal prosecutors work for him and it is natural to consider replacing them. “There is no indication that anybody did anything improper,” the president said.

Does this remind anyone of Watergate about 30 years ago? Of course, in Watergate, an actual crime was committed and the president participated in the cover-up.

Executive Privilege in that case was not backed by the courts.

Bush said his White House counsel, Fred Fielding, told lawmakers they could interview presidential counselor Karl Rove, former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and their deputies—but only on the president’s terms: in private, “without the need for an oath” and without a transcript.

The president cast the offer as virtually unprecedented and a reasonable way for Congress to get all the information it needs about the matter.

“If the Democrats truly do want to move forward and find the right information, they ought to accept what I proposed,” Bush said. “If scoring political points is the desire, then the rejection of this reasonable proposal will really be evident for the American people to see.”

Bush said he would aggressively fight in court any attempt to subpoena White House aides.

“If the staff of a president operated in constant fear of being hauled before various committees to discuss internal deliberations, the president would not receive candid advice and the American people would be ill-served,” he said. “I’m sorry the situation has gotten to where it’s got, but that’s Washington, D.C., for you. You know there’s a lot of politics in this town.”

Sen. Chuck Schumer, who is leading the Senate probe into the firings, spoke dismissively of the deal offered by the White House:

“It’s sort of giving us the opportunity to talk to them, but not giving us the opportunity to get to the bottom of what really happened here.”

Even without oaths, Bush aides would be legally required to tell the truth to Congress. But without a transcript of their comments, “it would be almost meaningless to say that they would be under some kind of legal sanction,” Schumer complained.

The new Democrat Congress has been flying high since the last election, as well they should, given their victories.

They need to learn the lesson they and the Republican Congresses before them failed to learn: the public doesn’t like all this partisanship.

We have terrorists who would love nothing more than an opportunity to kill more of us on American soil. We have a crisis at Walter Reed Army Hospital. We have a budget to pass and various and sundry other items, but they’re worried about destroying President Bush and nothing else, no matter what has to be done to do it, and no matter how the country suffers due to it.

The Democrats think they got a large mandate in November, when a few votes in a few places would have flipped the Congress the other way.

The American people are generally fair people and will stand up for the underdog.

If you paid any attention to the scant coverage of the Golden Eagles’ counter-demonstration in Washington this past week-end you would know the “silent majority” is beginning to get restless, and will be silent no longer.

I’ve seen this happenen in the ’70’s and the ’90’s with Bill Clinton. It wasn’t pretty either time and it won’t be pretty now.

Our Founding Fathers had a reason for giving us three separate but equal branches of government. They balance each other out, and if the Legislative and Executive Branches come to loggerheads the Judicial Branch settles the dispute.

For the sake of our country and not their party the Democrats need to accept this compromise by the president or draw us through another constitutional crisis I feel sure they will lose in the courts.

Others blogging on this story: Musing Minds with all but a couple of seconds of the president’s statement.

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