{"id":199501,"date":"2007-07-22T19:22:00","date_gmt":"2007-07-23T00:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2007\/07\/22\/bush-now-claims-that-he-is-king\/"},"modified":"2007-07-22T19:22:00","modified_gmt":"2007-07-23T00:22:00","slug":"bush-now-claims-that-he-is-king","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2007\/07\/22\/bush-now-claims-that-he-is-king\/","title":{"rendered":"Bush Now Claims that He is King"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Bush has now <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2007\/07\/19\/AR2007071902625.html?hpid=topnews\">forbidden the Justice Department from pursuing contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials<\/a> if executive privilege has been invoked.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\">Under federal law, a statutory contempt citation by the House or Senate must be submitted to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, &#8220;whose duty it shall be to bring the matter before the grand jury for its action.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\">But administration officials argued yesterday that Congress has no power to force a U.S. attorney to pursue contempt charges in cases, such as the prosecutor firings, in which the president has declared that testimony or documents are protected from release by executive privilege. Officials pointed to a Justice Department legal opinion during the Reagan administration, which made the same argument in a case that was never resolved by the courts.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\">&#8230;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\">Mark J. Rozell, a professor of public policy at George Mason University who has written a book on executive-privilege issues, called the administration&#8217;s stance &#8220;astonishing.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\">&#8220;That&#8217;s a breathtakingly broad view of the president&#8217;s role in this system of separation of powers,&#8221; Rozell said. &#8220;What this statement is saying is the president&#8217;s claim of executive privilege trumps all.&#8221;<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Impeachment investigations trump executive privilege.  This is why proceeding should start against both Bush and Cheney tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bush has now forbidden the Justice Department from pursuing contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials if executive privilege has been invoked. Under federal law, a statutory contempt citation by the House or Senate must be submitted to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, &#8220;whose duty it shall be to bring &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,978],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199501"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199501"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199501\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}