U.S. Attorneys Quick Hits

Wow, the subject is growing so much it can support its own subject-specific Quick Hits. I think there may be a sitcom project in the works for pilot season.

• Today the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to approved issuing subpoenas for White House advisors to testify before Congress. They joined the House Judiciary Committee, which did the much the same thing yesterday. Both committees are holding off actually serving the subpoenas while they negotiate with the executive branch for some sort of agreement. In the Senate committee, go-along-to-get-along Arlen Specter suggested that perhaps they should just accept what the White House is willing to give them and leave it at that. That might be fine, except that Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy pointed out, "What we're told we can get is nothing, nothing, nothing." We can only guess what Dick Cheney thinks about the situation.

• We shouldn't forget that Specter is the one who slipped the provision into the renewal of the Patriot Act that allowed the Prez to fire U.S. attorneys and replace them without Senate hearings and approval in the first place. Sure, he cleaned up his mess, cosponsoring the legislation that removed that little detail, but he's still trying to find some comfortable place in the middle. He abstained from voting on the subpoenas today.

• In an unfortunate case of being hoist on his own petard, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow was confronted with a column from his past that seemed to put him at odds with the position he's defending about Rove and Miers testifying before Congress. Olivier Knox of Agence France-Presse read the quote to Snow at a press briefing yesterday, but the Chicago Tribune blog reprinted Snow's original 1998 column. Here's a snippet:

Evidently, [the President] wants to shield virtually any communications that take place within the White House compound on the theory that all such talk contributes in some way, shape or form to the continuing success and harmony of an administration. Taken to its logical extreme, that position would make it impossible for citizens to hold a chief executive accountable for anything. He would have a constitutional right to cover up.

He was writing about a different president, of course, but the parallels are obvious. Maybe not obvious to everyone. Not surprisingly, Snow responded that the current situation is NOT THE SAME^TM.