The Constitutional Crisis Within

* Marty Lederman:

"The Constitutional Crisis Within
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Hot tip for the mainstream press (not to mention Congress):

This is not your everyday occurrence. As I've been trying to emphasize, this internal DOJ showdown -- and, more broadly, the role of the Vice President's office in pushing a constitutional vision so extreme that the entire upper echelon of the Ashcroft Justice Department was ready to resign over it -- is a very big deal, what you might fairly call a huge story.

Indeed, other than the tragedy of Iraq (which, not coincidentally, is also the result of the President permitting the government to be controlled by a small coterie of like-minded extremists who were committed to ignoring all professional and expert perspectives inconsistent with their world view), this is probably the most important story of Bush Administration. And there is a ton of information that we do not yet know.

Hot tip No. 2: There is far, far too much focus on Alberto Gonzales in current press and congressional investigations. Just as he was merely a rubber stamp for Rove, et al. in the U.S. Attorney and related scandals, so, too, in these much more significant constitutional crises, he is "merely" an apparatchik, a hired gun of sorts. The real action here has always been in the Vice President's Office -- and on the intrigung question of why the President has repeatedly allowed the Vice President's idiosyncratic views to determine state policy -- and that's where the smoke and fire will be if and when the media and Congress ever get to the bottom of it."