You can't make me, nyaaah

Mmkay. So, last week we had this thing go down.

Essentially, Congress got annoyed at the President and his people over their stonewalling on the US Attorney firings bit. Congress instituted contempt of Congress proceedings against some people in the administration, which would be investigated/prosecuted by the Justice Department. That's the way that's supposed to work.

The President said, no, that can't happen.

The excuse the President uses is this: the "unitary executive" theory, to which the President (claims to) subscribe, says that according to one reading of the constitution the executive branch is a united whole: everyone who works for the executive branch is under the complete control of the president, and the entire branch represents a projection of the president's will. Under this theory, the executive branch shouldn't be thought of as a bunch of people working together, but as a single entity. Basically, the entire branch is the President.

Well, if the executive branch is a single entity, then that leads to a number of interesting consequences. For instance, the Environmental Protection Agency can't sue the military. Since they are both arms of the executive branch, and the executive branch is essentially the President, that would amount to "the President suing himself."

Bear in mind this is a constitutional argument. The argument therefore is seen to trump any mere legal issue.

Well, now we come to this matter: Congress has instituted contempt of Congress proceedings against some people in the administration. The Justice Department has the job of investigating this. Except that, remember, under unitary executive theory the Justice Department and these administration officials are the same entity. That would be like someone prosecuting themselves. That, the President says, can't happen.

Well, more to the point I think, he says he will tell the Justice Department not to pursue the case.

What I'd like to point out about this line of reasoning is, at the end of it, the executive branch and everyone in it is exempt from prosecution. So long as everyone in the administration is doing what the President wants, if any of his people get into legal trouble, he can simply tell the Justice Department not to prosecute them for executing his will. The executive branch is essentially above the law.

Even more than that, if the argument is that the Justice Department can't constitutionally prosecute administration officials at all, then that leads to the even more wacky conclusion that even if the President's people are doing illegal things against his will, they can't be prosecuted for it.

What occurs to me is that this puts the President and the arguers for unitary executive here in a bad position. Either they have to admit that the President's people aren't even under the President's control, or they have to admit that the President can constitutionally bring legal charges against his people, in which case the executive isn't quite so unitary as they're trying to claim and the President is simply being very selective in how he chooses to fulfill his constitutional obligations to uphold the law.

Divorced from the (apparently vacuous and poorly-thought-out) constitutional and legal arguments, however, it seems to me that this is just another of a long series of incidents wherein the President reveals his true nature, a bratty little kid on a playground who thinks he can do whatever he wants and get away with it.

And dare I say, it's the well-being of the nation that's the toy he's stolen and is now beating on the ground to see if it breaks.

Meta

Apologies for the lack of regular updates these days.

My excuse (and I'm sticking to it) is that work has been very stressful lately. There were a bunch of demos we had to give for products that didn't yet exist, so we have been working pretty hard to create something that we could show off at those demos.

Then of course we had to work hard to make stuff that is actually good out of the cobbled-together mess we created in our hurry to get ready for the demos. Meeting the deadlines involved a lot of cut corners and truly awful code-writing, which must now be fixed.

As a result, outside of work I've been feeling drained and uncreative, and have had little energy left for blogging.

For instance: it occurred to me at the time that I could write about Scooter Libby's sentence being commuted by the president, but by the time I had enough energy to write about it, that was a week later.

Or maybe I was just at a total loss for words about that whole thing. It was probably one or both of those.

Anyway, stuff at work is slowing down, so hopefully I will now have both time and inclination. Stay tuned.