I listened to some of the hearing, about as much as I could stand; Jennings invoked that again and again and again, with Arlen Specter talking at length about how distracting this must be for poor Jennings and the poor White House counsels. Poor babies, being inconvenienced by this, but at least even lamewad Leahy growled that it was far more distracting and frustrating for them than it was for Jennings, and urged that Jennings read "Catch-22."

How odd that there seems to be such a clear impeachment opportunity at a time when it is less likely to be considered than ever.

I'm reminded of James Madison's warning against factions in Federalist No. 10 -- although I think he underestimated the peril a country could face from a minority faction, which the GOP represents. The Anti-Federalists were more fundamentally correct about the dangers of factions than Madison was, I think, or more realistic in understanding that a republic of great size was likelier to be doomed by factionalism than a smaller republic.

The GOP is a minority faction that has hijacked the nation. We've got judges who are partial to their ideological underpinnings and subservient to the "Unitary Executive," a Chief Executive who will not faithfully uphold and execute the law, a Vice President who has become his own branch of government, and Congresspeople who continue to be more loyal to their faction than to the country at large.

Everything the various GOP players in question, whether Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rice, DeLay, Roberts, Scalia, Gonzales, the late Rehnquist, Thomas, Alito, Hatch, Specter, Cannon, Forbes, Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, etc., etc., all the way down the food chain to people like Jennings (who, to have reached the White House by age 29 must have been one superlative bootlicker) -- all of them clearly place party loyalty and factional obedience above service to the country.

Their efforts to break the checks and balances system and unify Party and State are abominable, unconstitutional, and reprehensible. I wonder if the Democrats are even capable of fighting something like this, let alone willing.

Madison contended that the cure was worse than the disease with factions, so one had to deal with the effects of them, although, again, he was occupied with majority factions. The GOP is a minority faction. Justice John Paul Stevens said it well when he said "Parties ranked high on the list of evils that the Constitution was designed to check."

Can there be any party more partisan than the GOP? Any party more willing to abrogate the Constitution for their own ends? No way. They've outdone themselves.

Boy, I'd love to know what Specter and Bush talked about on that plane flight they shared the other week, the one where Specter declined to share the content of his conversations with the President. But whatever Bush told him (whether it was "roll over, play dead" or something similar), Specter received it loud and clear, and is doing his part. His tone has definitely changed since that plane flight.

There's a disturbing synergy between Leahy and Specter, if you watch them together, which is why this matters, despite the fact that Leahy runs the committee; Leahy is predictably chummily deferential to Specter, them being all Senatorial and such. So Specter's windbagging on this actually can matter, depending on how that affects what Leahy actually does, if anything.

My hope is that enough voters realize that they need to get more Republicans out of Congress in 2008, as well as out of the White House. More and more, it also points to the need for serious campaign finance reform, for an end to incumbency advantages, and for public financing of elections, just to break the partisan lock on the levers of power, as a hopeful cure for factionalism. I'm sure the GOP will be all for that once they get swept out in 2008.

I'm glad you posted that exchange, Mr. Grieve; it made me want to tear off my earphones! Senator Schumer asked...

Yes, but you have to -- you can't just answer the ones you want to answer and not answer the ones you don't want to answer. What is the rationale -- the legal rationale -- of answering all the others and not this one?

And yet, he does, and he can. They're all playing this rope-a-dope with Congress on these issues, sticking hard to their lack of principle. And weirdly, I find a kind of similarity of that unprincipled move with a piece in Slate by Doug Kendall and Jim Ryan about Clarence Thomas's highly selective originalism in his rulings...

His recent opinions instead suggest that Thomas will use originalism where it provides support for a politically conservative result, even if that support is weak, as it is in the student-speech case. But where history provides no support, he's likely to ignore it altogether.

http://www.slate.com/id/2171508/nav/tap3/

And I see this as another ideologically-driven corollary to the White House's stonewalling on executive privilege, and, of course, on counting on the Supremes' to selectively uphold it, if push comes to shove, for ideological reasons, though dressed up in the legal equivalent of "truthiness" -- what would that be?

The "now you see it/now you don't" roving executive privilege invocation coyly asserted by this maladministration is the ultimate defense, and I fear that tainted Supremes like Thomas (and Roberts, Scalia, and Alito) will be just fine with it. But the unconstitutional principle these hacks are sticking to is that the Chief Executive can do whatever (s)he wants, any time, and Congress can't do anything about it. That's why the fight over this is worth having for both sides -- but only one side has the Constitution in its corner on this, and it's not the Unitary Executive.