All Blog Posts from Political Hotsheet

Believe it or not, this is precisely the way the Founding Fathers envisioned how the Constitution could work. Pressure from the judicial branch (a pending deadline to file a substantive brief) and the legislative branch (Congressional subpoenas to Bush officials) forced the White House into compromising over the scope of executive privilege in the U.S. Attorney matter. It’s a win-win-win, Steve Carell would say.

Or, you can look at it another way. The deal that finally delivers Karl Rove and Harriet Miers into Rep. John Conyers Congressional den of inquiry came about because neither the Obama Administration, nor the Congress, wanted to risk creating “bad” legal precedent about the scope of the privilege—federal law that might be political convenient now, but which could hinder future administrations (or even this one, a few years down the road).

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