House Judiciary Committee to Vote on Issuing Contempt Citataions

In the continuing, meaningless fight between the White House and Congress over the U.S. Attorney firings, the House Judiciary Committee is set to vote on issuing contempt of Congress citations to former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and current White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten.

In the House, Conyers said the decision to move forward with contempt proceedings was made reluctantly, but he asserted that the committee had few options in the face of the White House's refusal to comply with committee subpoenas. "It is still my hope that they will reconsider this hard-line position and cooperate with our investigation so that we can get to the bottom of this matter," Conyers said.

The panel's move comes after months of legal feuding between congressional Democrats and Bush. He has declared that details about the firings are protected from disclosure by executive privilege and need not be shared with Congress.

On a purely constitutional ground, the President is right. Of course, Conyers is within his power to issue the citations, but nothing will come of it.

Given the poor public perception of this Congress and the only slightly better perception of this Administration, the question of what is gained by pursuing this issue remains open. The White House has already screwed the pooch on this question by denying the political overtones and trying to manage some sort of reasoning, when all it had to say was "we wanted to make a change." The Democratically controlled Congress, whose only forte appears to be politically motivated investigations, will gain nothing either. Suppose Congress gets some current or former White House staffer to say that the firings were politically motivated. What will they do with such an admission? The admission certainly won't be "news" since most of America believes the firings were politically motivated and quite frankly have moved on to more important matters.

Congress might use the admission to pursue some very ill advised legislation about the hiring and firing of U.S. Attorneys, but no Administration, Republican or Democrat is going to want to have their hands tied in such a manner. Leaving aside the political problems with such legislation, the constitutional hurdles will be pretty significant since it is the Executive branch that is charged with enforcing the laws and the President should have full discretion on who is hired to carry out that task.

In the end, both sides have handled this issue so poorly that Americans continue to lose more and more faith in their government.