What is the POINT in delegating oversight powers to Congress if the White House can just withold documents from Congress? And what good is it if Congress doesn't ENFORCE their duty to oversee the executive branch?
First we have Fitzgeralds notes about emails people talked about that never made it to the archive system... And now we see that Gonzales is holding back documents relating to the Plame leak as well... Documents related to an investigation... Shouldn't this be considered Obstruction of Justice?
And how about this? Straight from John Conyers, on his Resolution of Inquiry into the NSA spying...
A few quick impressions: first, I was surprised at how half hearted the Republican defense of the program was. I would even go further -- while some offered a full throated defense of the program, many of my Republican colleagues seemed almost sheepish about it, and many did not speak about it at all.
Second, Republicans repeatedly asserted that the documents were not needed because Judiciary Chairman Sensenbrenner has unilaterally submitted 51 questions (pdf) to the Attorney General, and that the Attorney General would testify at a general oversight hearing at some undetermined point in the future. I and the other Democratic Members responded that this was wholly inadequate, and that to fulfill their constitutional oversight role the Committee needed to obtain documents from the Administration and hold separate hearings on the NSA issue.
More to the point, while some news outlets touted the Chairman's letter, his questions are, in my view, inadequate. A close reading of them reveals that the first 38 questions essentially ask the Department whether they think the program is legal. They have already given us their answer on that. The remaining questions are so general, that they can be answered by a google search of what is already in the press.
How can we even maintain the ILLUSION of democracy? Can we still save our democracy from the one party administration that has siezed control?
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