Resentment boiled among senior Republicans for a second day on Tuesday after a team of warrant-bearing agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation turned up at a closed House office building on Saturday evening, demanded entry to the office of a lawmaker and spent the night going through his files.
The episode prompted cries of constitutional foul from Republicans — even though the lawmaker in question, Representative William J. Jefferson of Louisiana, is a Democrat whose involvement in a bribery case has made him an obvious partisan political target.
Speaker J. Dennis Hastert raised the issue personally with President Bush on Tuesday. The Senate Rules Committee is examining the episode.
Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House majority leader, predicted that the separation-of-powers conflict would go to the Supreme Court. “I have to believe at the end of the day it is going to end up across the street,” Mr. Boehner told reporters gathered in his conference room, which looks out on the Capitol plaza and the court building.
A court challenge would place all three branches of government in the fray over whether the obscure “speech and debate” clause of the Constitution, which offers some legal immunity for lawmakers in the conduct of their official duties, could be interpreted to prohibit a search by the executive branch on Congressional property.
What are these guys thinking? The Congress has been the source of scandal after scandal involving both parties and now they want a sanctuary from every and all oversight.
This all started because a crooked Democrat would not abide by a valid and legal subpoena for documents. So the FBI had no choice but to get a warrant from a federal judge for his office. Do any of these elected officials believe the people of this country will back their attempts to be above the law? If they do they are in for a bad ride.
No one on either side of the aisle believes that our congress should consist of untouchable representatives of the people.
Big Lizards puts it succinctly:
Logically, if we were to take their assertions of blanket immunity from search and seizure at face value, then what is the House, from Republican Speaker Hastert down to the lowliest Democratic mouse, saying?
They are saying that if Marion Barry were elected to Congress, he could sit there in his congressional office, in full view of God and Man, openly smoking crack and shooting up heroin… and the FBI, the DEA, and the Capitol Police could only stand helplessly watching. So long as he kept his stash in the office, he needn’t even hide it — because Congress has a private law that says “what happens under the Dome stays under the Dome.”
The Times hints at a somewhat narrower concern: a number of House members have recently fallen afoul of corruption investigations; thus, Congress — which Mark Twain declared America’s only “native criminal class” — may suddenly perceive a class interest in preventing the executive from searching the hollowed halls of the Capitol building or the Executive Office Building. At least, not without a warning view halloo, to give members time to “tidy up” just a skosh.
The kicker of this whole thing is the fact that Hastert has successfully accomplished what many of us believed would happen. Turning the lens from a crooked Democrat to George Bush. Only most of us believed the left would accomplish this.
How wrong we were.
I’m telling ya, things are getting strange.
- Captain’s Quarters
- Gateway Pundit
- Sister Toldjah
- A Blog For All
- RightWing News
- The Strata-Sphere
- Roger Simon
- Macsmind
It’s an interesting constitutional issue. But I wish our side hadn’t stepped all over the news of Democrat corruption by distracting people with the larger issue.