Specter should resign in disgrace, or be run out of town on a rail-gun. Or impeached.
TPMmuckraker February 6, 2007 12:18 PM :
If Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) is to be believed, no one in the Senate, not even himself, realized that the law had been changed governing the nomination of U.S. Attorneys -- a change that gave the administration the power to appoint federal prosecutors indefinitely without Senate confirmation.
In later remarks during this morning's hearing, Specter explained to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) that he didn't know about the provision until she approached him on the floor and asked about it recently. He then asked his chief counsel, Michael O'Neill, who explained that the provision had been inserted into the USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act at the request of the Department of Justice.
So Specter is angry at the insinuation that he “slipped in” the change... but not even he knew that his own staff member had made the change.
....
Specter explained that the request for the language's insertion came from a Justice Department representative, Brett Tolman, who is now the United States Attorney for Utah, and that the principal reason for the change was to resolve “separation of power issues.”According to the original law, the Attorney General could appoint interim U.S. Attorneys, but if they were not nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate within 120 days of being appointed, the federal district court would appoint a replacement. Justice Department officials apparently didn't like that judges were able to appoint U.S. Attorneys, members of the executive branch, so the new language removed the court's involvement in the process. But in doing that, the change also allowed the administration to handpick replacements and keep them there in perpetuity
...
Update: Uh oh. In remarks later in the hearing, Sen. Feinstein addressed Specter's insertion of the measure, making a point of saying that the language had indeed been “slipped in,” adding that it had been slipped in “in a way that I don’t believe that anyone on this committee knew it was in the law... no Republican, no Democrat.”Later Update: OK. In later remarks in response to Feinstein, Specter said that he actually didn't know about the added provision until Feinstein approached him recently about the issue. After Feinstein's inquiry, Specter says, he asked his chief counsel about the issue, who then explained what had happened. So according to him, Specter's staff was responsible for the provision, but Specter himself didn't know about it.
What? we live in a so-called banana Republic now?
Technorati Tags: Impeachment, incompetence, Rule_of_Law, Rethuglicans, terrorism
