Time to confess to error. A while back I reported that the Congress had filed contempt charges against Harriet Meiers and Joshua Bolton. I erred. In fact, the Judiciary Committee had merely filed the charge with the full House. I was wrong about something else:
A criminal contempt charge must be enforced by a U.S. Attorney. Bush has already mandated that this will not take place. The charges will languish, and Congress will do nothing.
I was wrong about this because Congress is not going to give Bush the chance to demonstrate its impotence. The leadership has decided to take the bull by the horns and demonstrate that fact all on its own:
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.
There will, of course, always be something more pressing than establishing that Congress is a co-equal branch. After all, when you are up against the most unpopular president in American history, you have to be careful. There is no reason to try to rein in an abuse of power of one sort while trying to limit other abuses of power. You might reinforce your own message and no Democrat would want to do that.
Maybe the strategy is to wait until we get a Democratic president, who won’t stand in the way of a prosecution. I doubt it, though. If the Democrats take the White House, and don’t underestimate their chances of blowing it, or of the Republicans chances to steal it, they will no doubt decide that we must get all this stuff behind us. No truth commissions in this country.
I will venture a prediction: Miers will never testify and she will never see the inside of a cell.
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