Where is the outrage?

For Gentle Readers who don't follow the Our Only President Outrages day to day, but like to have a small hissy fit in the privacy of Your Humble Blogger's Tohu Bohu, may I pass along a juicy one? It seems that the Attorney General has been replacing United States Attorneys; at least seven in the last two months have resigned.Anyway, it seems that until last year, if a US Attorney resigned in the middle of his term, a federal judge appointed a replacement, or, in certain circumstances, the US Attorney General could appoint a temporary replacement for a limited time. A permanent appointment as US Attorney needs to be confirmed by the Senate.

Now, due to a provision in the All-New Extra-Patriotic Supplemental and Improved Patriot Act, the US Attorney General, at the moment Alberto Gonzales, can create a vacancy and then fill that vacancy without Senate confirmation or hearing. That provision, by the way, was not brought forward as an amendment to be voted on by the Senate or the House of Representatives, as one might expect in a parliamentary republic. No, the language was inserted in the conference committee, whose job is to reconcile the Senate and House versions. In the past, it was Not Done to add entirely new provisions at that stage, which of course doesn't mean it was never done, but it was recognized that doing so was cheating (or transgressing the institutional norms, which comes to the same thing). The last six years saw conference committees doing that sort of thing regularly. The House would pass a radical bill, the Senate would pass a more reasonable version of the bill, and then the bill would go to conference committee and come out looking like the House version, only more radical. At that point a Senator could propose no new amendments, but only vote Da or Nyet. Should a Senator vote for a moderate bill but against the later radical bill, he would of course be charged with flip-flopping, with being before the bill before he was against it. Shocking!

Well, and of course now that they are given such unfettered authority, Our Only President and his cabal of incompetents and crooks wouldn't dream of replacing Attorneys of competence and integrity and replacing them with party hacks. No. And, of course, the whole point of our Constitution is to rely on the good judgment of whoever happens to be in office, right?

To follow the details of this and other outrages, I recommend TPM Muckraker, a tragically indispensible portion of Joshua Michah Marshall's ever-increasing blog empire.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.