I read the piece in WSJ today and I had to look up the Democratic congresswoman who apparently co-wrote it with McConnell.  I thought it was such a load of hooey I wrote her this note:

It's odd that "Intelligence" is not one of the issues that can be selected, especially since you're a subcommittee chair.
Although I am not someone who voted to put you in office your opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal today addresses every American's future and I feel that all of us should respond in kind.  

I would like ask a simple question this morning.

Speaker Pelosi, members of the Democratic Caucus, is there any law that President Bush can break, any outrage that his administration can perpetrate, any act that will compel you and the caucus to investigate this President and this administration?  Please Madam Speaker, tell us why this President must be given not only the broadest possible leeway, but complete freedom to act as a brigand at his leisure?  You have many staffers and aides who can give your reply to us and you will be surprised at how quickly your reply will be transliterated from political-ese into understandable terms for the readership.

This was asked by another front pager earlier today.  This question deserves to be asked over and over.  Due to the lack of an open thread, I feel compelled to use a diary to ask this question.    

This morning's Diane Rehm show on NPR dealt with the following topic:

This Presidents Day we look at what many constitutional scholars and former government officials see as the expanding role of the Executive Branch since 9/11, and whether Congress is fulfilling its constitutional role of legislative oversight.

 My first reaction to the question is

Do bears crap in the woods?

The idea that we need to devote a lot of time to the obvious turned me off.  I hoped that we would hear some suggestions about what to do.  Look below the fold to see more about this issue.

The democrats in congress just got screwed by the GOP again. It hasn't been in the headlines, but there has been a partisan bent to the hearings in congress today.

Democrats seem to want to press the issue of Clemens lying to congressional investigators while republicans are being skeptical of Brian McNamee's charges and pretty much ignoring the Pettite testimony.

Here are some opinions about todays testimony after the jump

Under Section 8 of Article I of the United States Constitution are the following clauses regarding the duties of the U.S. Congress:

To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;

.... To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces;

.... To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

Back to work folks!

Both the Senate and the House will be holding hearings today.  I don't see a Live Blog up.

I'll post the links, but I gotta leave.  Use this as a Live Blog or the incentive to start your own Live Blog.  

One aspect of the problem with telecom immunity and FISA is the abuse of intelligence briefing procedures by the Bush administration.

From 2001 through 2006 the Bush administration gave key intelligence briefings to only selected members of Congress, not to the entire intelligence committees.  This practice may have been illegal.  

Now, Congress should take the initiative to prevent a recurrence of this pratice by outlawing the restricted briefings.

I took my dog for a walk yesterday, and something happened that me realize:  he's got more on the ball, morally, than a lot of appointees in the Bush administration.

Bodhi is a large, white malemute, very wolfish in look but not in affect, and I've worked a bit to train him:  you don't want a big dog like that to be out of control.  So we were walking in the park and came on the dead carcass of a squirrel.  Dead meat of any kind is naturally interesting to Bodhi, but I didn't want him to fool with it.  I called him off, and I could see that he had a moment of hestiation.  Self interest says, 'do this.'  Duty says, 'go to Eric.'  He did the right thing and left the squirrel alone to come back to me.  Which means:  he's capable of recognizing a conflict of interest, and knowing on what side he has to resolve it.    

Which is more than you can say for Bush appointee Julie MacDonald.  

Six months have passed since I told you that a year had passed since I told you you weren't getting your oversight.

And you're not. Because Rahm Emanuel says so:

House Democrats have postponed a vote until December on contempt resolutions against White House chief of staff Josh Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers, delaying for now any constitutional showdown with the White House over the president’s power to resist congressional subpoenas.

Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) has been pushing for the contempt vote, arguing that the White House must be held accountable for ignoring subpoenas issued by his panel as part of the U.S. attorney firing scandal. Other top Democrats, including Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), have argued that the House should put off that fight while debates over Iraq funding and electronic eavesdropping dominate the floor. The contempt vote had been tentatively scheduled for Friday before Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) informed his colleagues that it was being delayed.

"[Emanuel] has been saying that this week is not the time to do this, that it will step on our message on Iraq and FISA," said a top House Democratic leadership aide.

Only guess what? The message on Iraq and FISA and these subpoenas is all the same: George W. Bush thinks there are no Congressional checks and balances against his "inherent powers."

If Congress legislates limits on his eavesdropping schemes, he'll veto them (so says Chuck Schumer's new pal, Michael "Wrong on Torture, but still kinda OK" Mukasey).

If they mandate withdrawal of troops from Iraq, he'll defy it (not veto -- defy).

If they subpoena his staff and demand answers, he'll block it.

But Rahm Emanuel thinks the Bush "administration's" blanket insistence on unchecked executive power can and should be split up into bite-sized chunks that the American public can safely ignore. Each front in the Bush/Cheney war on our constitutional system of government ought to be considered in isolation from the rest, so that they can be swept under the rug quietly in discrete and manageable news cycles. (But with a paper trail of press releases "objecting" to each fresh outrage, so that the historical record appears to register dissent.)

Or at least he hopes so, so that he can trade the long-term viability of the constitutional system of government for a strategy he believes will result in more seats in a branch that's got no game plan for preserving its power. More seats at the kiddie table.

The Iraq fight is the FISA fight is the subpoena fight.

Chairman Conyers wants it. Nancy Pelosi wants it. Even Steny Hoyer looks like he wants it.

But somehow, Rahm Emanuel's Kiddie Table Seating Chart carries the day.

A few days ago I warned that this was coming in a post in Democratic Underground. Actually, the post was addressed to the Democrats in Congress, but this time I am addressing my remarks to everyone,  because I think Congressional Democrats may need some prodding if they are to wake up and smell the smoke from the fire that is burning around their feet. A really nasty election dirty trick is being played right now. This is the Republican dirty trick that cost Gore 2000 and Kerry 2004, and it will be the GOP dirty trick that allows a Republican to steal the for sure Democratic win presidential election next fall---unless something is done to put a stop to it.

One of the biggest stories of the past week was Erik Prince, CEO of Murder, INC, (aka Blackwater USA) testifying before congress about his employees shooting up the streets of Iraq, all in the name of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. We all know of the Sept. 16 incident in which his mercencies went on a murderous rampage and killed or wounded over 30 Iraqis. During the hearings, Prince spouted off numbers designed to deceive the American people and defuse the uproar.  He told investigators that Blackwater opened fire on 195 occasions out of more than 16,000 missions in Iraq since 2005. Why, that is only a hair over a 1% incident rate, so what is the big deal?  It is a minor genital discharge rate and such a small price to pay to keep all the VIPs visiting Iraq to drink new and improved Green Zone Kool-Aid safe and secure.  Unfortunately, an overlooked article in the Washington Post by Steve Fainaru says the new age Pinkertons are much more likely to shoot up the streets of Baghdad than the dark Prince led investigators to believe.

The talk around Washington is that Congressional Republicans will try to slip through a newer, meaner FISA Bill and Congressional Democrats will let them. Afterwards, we will hear the usual chorus of "We can not afford to look weak on terrorism with an election coming up", but consider this article from September in the New York Times.

Go back in time---way back in time---to the first George W. Bush administration, when the top players in the executive branch pretended that they did not believe themselves above the law. Mind you, that was only because they knew that they had to get reelected in 2004. They could not reveal their disdain for the American voter---yet.

You may have caught Dick Cheney’s latest performance on Larry King’s show the other night, in which he agreed with the way Edelman dismissed Hillary Clinton’s request for a briefing regarding the Pentagon’s plans for getting our troops out of Iraq.  Never happy to let things calm down, Cheney implied that Congressional oversight only "reinforces enemy propaganda".

We all know what a crock of sh#t that is, and so does Hillary.  True to form, Hillary’s not letting this go without a response.  She’s just fired off a letter to Cheney and will send a formal request to Bush asking him just what the official White House position is on Congressional oversight, and whether she and the rest of Congress are entitled to know just how they plan to bring our troops home.

What do you wanna bet Bush asserts "executive privilege" on this just like everything else?

Make the jump...

  I know, I know.  Yet another impeachent entry.  Because of the deluge of other diaries on this subject, I don't expect this one to get much attention  or recommendations (if at all), but I wanted something documented for my own purposes and posterity.
  Accordingly, there's no need to devote the hours researching for supporting links, or to fill this page with them:  the excuses, the reasons, the imperative to impeach have been foremost on the minds of astute Kossacks since the "I'm the dictator" statement Georgie made before the 2000 "election" (at least, in mine, as any of my associates [in Tech Support] in those days could attest).
  So my two cents, dispensed with as quickly and efficiently as possible, are below the fold.

Obscenity and its parent adjective obscene take their derivation from the Greek terms ob skene, which literally means "offstage".  This is because violent acts in Greek theatre were committed off stage.  In contemporary society, people are often concerned about obscene acts that occur in public.

If Harriet Miers appeared in public sporting a leash and ball gag while the President had his way with her on the floor of the Senate, would you consider that obscene?  Would you consider it criminal, even if they were both consenting adults?  Would you call the police?  If the police shrugged and said it was not their problem, would you walk away?

If they were your employees, would you let them continue working for you?  If they were neighbors, would you invite them in to your home?  Would you let them watch over your children?  Would you trust them with the keys to your house?  

If you had photographic evidence of this behavior, what would you do with it?  I ask because I wonder how you feel about this....

Its now July-almost 7 months into this Congressional cycle- and Lieberman has not yet been tossed out of the party and there is nary a twitter from the leadership about impeachment. Echoes of old and more of the same.