And The Battle Is Joined

Only the people are missing.

High-handed hocus-pocus

The president will soon brandish his right of executive privilege to ward off congressional inquisitors who wish to grill, under oath, corrupt former White House officials who conspired with corrupt Justice Department officials to tweak the nation's time-honored system of impartial, nonpartisan jurisprudence -- the latter being, it is rumored, that which has always separated this great nation from the brutal banana republics of men, not laws.

As one news analysis put it, "Democrats want to know if the White House allowed politics to interfere with the Justice Department," which is like asking if the mob ever "allowed" criminal activity in the operation of unions under its malignant umbrella. But ask they must, as a formality.

Personally, I'd love it if Democrats came up empty handed; if they managed, that is, to isolate
one solitary department or agency or lonely bureaucrat somewhere, anywhere, in the last seven years that has not been subjected to White House politics. It would prove the proverbial exception to the rule, which is presumed a universal exception, but still eludes, to the best of everyone's knowledge, the Bush administration's rule.

At any rate, with high indignation the president will whoop and wail about preserving his right of executive privilege, which, he and his legal guns will imply, if not directly assert, the Founding Fathers embalmed in the U.S. Constitution. Even tin-horn dictators like Bush have, they will plead in effect, a constitutional right to hatch lunatic conspiracies in the Oval Office, free from prying eyes and prying ears. It's his constitutional sandbox, and he has every right to play in it however he wants. After all, how can he, as a mere, inept layman, be expected to slickly subvert the constitution in the absence of protected, free-ranging, expert felonious counsel?

Some of this reasoning will surely proceed from their sense of "strict constructionism," that legal curiosity around which Bush & Friends have built splendid political careers. And they are very strict about it. As just one example, they have campaigned for decades against a woman's right to choose based on the "right of privacy," because there's no such phrasing in the constitution. Hence Roe v. Wade -- that twisting of literal language and thus original intent -- is intolerable.
But there's a trifle hitch in what the president will claim as his own strict, constitutional right. And the hitch is, the constitution says no more about "executive privilege" than it does the "right to privacy." Nowhere in that document did the Founding Fathers enumerate this as a reigning doctrine of the land. Had they intended it, why in Jim Madison's name did they not nail it down in writing?

But ah, Bush & Friends will say, the de facto supremacy of executive privilege began with George Washington and, more important, has been constitutionally enshrined ever since by the Supreme Court through judicial review.

But there's another but, which likely strikes you before I can write it: Nowhere in the constitution do the words "judicial review" appear, either. It's merely an unAmerican construct concocted out of whole legal cloth by "activist judges" whose only intent has been to enslave us all through unelected, undemocratic, non-strict-constructionist arrogance and humbuggery.

Right? Or have I misread these paragons of strict constructionism in their railings against runaway activist judges?

We seem to be left with only one certainty. Bush & Friends' legal and political hypocrisy will prevail, of course. The inquisitors will be denied. The conspiracy's remnants will linger in camera. And the unitary executive will, once again, kick the stuffing out of accountability.


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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.