White House threatens to veto e-mail storage bill

[The Straight Story]

White House threatens to veto e-mail storage bill
By Dan Friedman CongressDaily July 9, 2008

Ahead of a scheduled House vote Wednesday, the White House threatened to veto a bill aimed at forcing the president and federal agencies to improve preservation of e-mail records.

House aides said that while they expect the measure to get bipartisan support, it will be considered under regular rules because of the veto threat.

The bill has generated some Republican opposition due to a provision the White House says gives the National Archives and Records Administration new responsibility for overseeing White House record-keeping.

The legislation would upset "delicate separation of powers" created in the 1978 Presidential Records Act and would "require the archivist to intrude, in an excessive and inappropriate manner, into the activities of an incumbent president and his or her staff," the White House said in a Statement of Administration Policy issued Tuesday.

Introduced by House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and two committee Democrats, the bill attempts to legislate a fix to problems that have left the Bush White House unable to find hundreds of days' worth of e-mails.

http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=40419&dcn=todaysnews

[Subdivisions]

1. Preservation of e-mail is already provided for by law. This is just

another way to retroactively legalize illegal behavior. They don't want us to have the e-mails, or they destroyed them, so they just retroactively legalize doing that.

Standard operating procedure for this government, top-to-bottom.

[JDPriestly]

2. Separation of powers only means something nowadays

when it more power to the governmental branch asserting it.