WSJ: Raiding Capitol Hill

[question everything]

The Wall Street Journal

May 30, 2006

Raiding Capitol Hill

May 30, 2006; Page A14

With the separation of powers, the Founders created a system with inevitable tension between Congress and the executive. Congress has been the biggest offender in stealing power from the executive in the modern era, but the May 20 FBI raid on the legislative office of William Jefferson (D., La.) seems a case in which the Justice Department has gone overboard, and even been insubordinate.

(snip)

In the case of Mr. Jefferson, Justice clearly had reason to consider a search. The Congressman is suspected of taking bribes, individuals have already pleaded guilty to paying him and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors, and a search of his home found $90,000 in his freezer. Mr. Jefferson says he has done nothing wrong, but we doubt he has found the miracle of an icebox that pays interest on deposits. Yet with all of this evidence in hand, the question is why prosecutors also felt the need to raid Mr. Jefferson's office in the middle of the night -- the first such raid in the history of Congress. They surely knew the raid would prompt embarrassing headlines, and for ambitious prosecutors that motive can never be ruled out. With Congress currently low in opinion polls, Justice officials may also have felt they could indulge in this kind of intimidation. If they really believe Mr. Jefferson is running a criminal enterprise out of his Capitol Hill office, they could always negotiate the parameters of such a search with House leaders.

Justice also hasn't helped its case with its bullying behavior after Speaker Denny Hastert denounced the raid. Someone leaked to ABC News that Mr. Hastert was himself a target of a Justice probe, and while it was quickly and officially denied, this kind of media ambush is typical of prosecutorial payback. Someone also leaked that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Deputy AG Paul McNulty had threatened to resign if President Bush returned material confiscated in the raid. So here we have someone at Justice trying to intimidate not just the House Speaker but also President Bush. If we were Mr. Bush, we'd have accepted both resignations on those grounds alone.

(snip)

Another, and related, bad argument is that the FBI raid was kosher because it was approved by a judge. But judicial warrants can never trump core Constitutional powers -- whether they are the rights of Congress under the Speech and Debate Clause, or the executive's ability to conduct warrantless wiretaps against al Qaeda under Presidential war powers. This willingness of modern liberalism to confer vast new authority on the judiciary is itself a violation of the separation of powers. The Founders designed a system in which each branch had to defend its own prerogatives, not one in which some local or district court judge was the final arbiter in such disputes. Congress and the President are ultimately accountable to the voters, while judges are not.

(snip)

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114893974948565654.html (subscriptin)

[bobbieinok]

1. recommended b/c this is the surprising view of the WSJ