This is a great piece at FDL on the the reaction to the US Attorney firings as expressed at a symposium on the subject in New York:

Sitting on the bench was a panel of experts discussing the "Hiring, Retention, and Firing of United States Attorneys". It was hard to say who was more outraged by the current rape of the Department of Justice, the massacre of United States Attorneys or the the obliteration of the concept of the rule of law and impartial administration of justice: the republicans on the panel or the democrats.
This is NOT a partisan issue any more. Republicans who respect the law and revere the honor and traditions of the Department of Justice are just as horrified as anyone who regularly swims here in the Lake. So, I thought I would give you some idea of the thoughts and opinions (publicly expressed–The Law Journal even had a reporter there–so I'm not telling tales out of school) of people of far greater stature and experience than I on the havoc that has been wrought by this administration.

Read the whole thing. A fantastic piece.

This is about the scariest article I have read in a while.

It begins with Jerry Falwell and his Liberty University dream of "training a new generation of lawyers, judges, educators, policymakers and world leaders in law from the perspective of an explicitly Christian worldview."

Then it lists the other law schools in the mold. The number is growing. Check out the quotes from the students.

Matthew Krause, among Liberty's first law graduates, is one of them. "I think we've complained too long about the destruction of our culture without taking any affirmative steps to remedy it," said the lanky, 26-year-old Texan. "We don't want abortion, but what are we doing about it? Let's get into the courts and find a way to combat that. Same-sex marriage we don't feel is right or a good thing for the culture. How are we going to stop that? You have to do that through the legal processes. Then, at the same time, vote in politicians who share those ideas and beliefs."

These schools exist to teach the students how to circumvent the constitution, eliminate the separation of church and state and deprive all of us of constitutional rights.

Another student says:

WH Spokesman Tony Fratto said:

As for no-confidence votes, maybe senators need a refresher course on American civics. . . . What I mean is I think you find no-confidence votes in parliamentary systems, not the American system of government.

Very true. Our system of government provides for a different mechanism:

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Speaking only for me, I agree with the White House that impeachment of Alberto Gonzales is the proper course.

Via Devil's Tower, Vice President Cheney makes an extraordinary argument:

Attorneys for Vice President Cheney and top White House officials told a federal judge today they cannot be held liable for anything they disclosed to reporters about covert CIA officer Valerie Plame or her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.

. . . Attorneys for Cheney and the other officials said any conversations they had about Plame with each other and reporters were part of their normal job duties because they were discussing foreign policy and engaging in an appropriate "policy dispute." Cheney's attorney went farther, arguing that Cheney is legally akin to the president because of his unique government role, and has absolute immunity from any lawsuit.

"So you're arguing there is nothing -- absolutely nothing - these officials could have said to reporters that would have been beyond the scope of their employment [whether it was] true or false?," U.S. District Judge John D. Bates asked.

The argument is akin to the absolute immunity granted to judges and prosecutors and the qualified immunity granted state actors in Section 1983 and Bivins suits. Except Cheney is arguing that the Vice President is like the President.

Does the argument make any sense? Does Jones v Clinton shed any light on this, considering the Jones suit was for alleged acts when Clinton was not President? I'll explore these issues on the flip.

President Bush refused to answer this question:

Q: There’s been some very dramatic testimony before the Senate this week from one of your former top Justice Department officials who describes a scene that some Senators called stunning, about a time when the warrantless wiretap program was being reviewed. Sir, did you send your then chief of staff and White House counsel to the bedside of John Ashcroft while he was ill to get him to approve that program, and do you believe that kind of conduct from White House officials is appropriate?

BUSH: Kelly, there’s a lot of speculation about what happened and what didn’t happen. I’m not going to talk about it. It’s a very sensitive program. . . .

No one asked him about the program. The question was a simple one - did he send Card and Gonzales to visit Ashcroft?

Atrios has the nuts*:

Back in those happy days in the 90s, if Clinton had refused to answer a question like this a shitstorm would've erupted. Ted Koppel would've put up a "17 days and still no answer" clock. Tweety would have had 37 blond conservative lawyers on every night to demand "accountability." etc... etc...

• in the poker sense.

Yesterday, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was asked by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee about his sworn testimony that "the Terrorist Surveillance Program had aroused no controversy inside the Bush administration, despite congressional testimony Tuesday [by James Comey]that senior departmental officials nearly resigned in 2004 to protest such a program."

Gonzo's response? "The Justice Department said yesterday that it will not retract . . ." Must have been talking about some different illegal surveillance program. But these questions still stand; does Gonzales still stand by these statements?

I take my responsibilities very seriously in respecting the role of the Department of Justice, given to the department by Congress, to decide for the executive branch what the law requires . . .

I understand and it's my judgment that I don't get to decide for the executive branch what the law is. Ultimately, that is the president, of course. But by statute, the Department of Justice is given the authority to provide advice to the executive branch.

And so, while I certainly participate in discussions about these matters, at the end of the day, that opinion represents the position of the department and therefore the position of the executive branch.

James Comey testified that Gonzales did not accept the Justice Department as the "decide[er] for the executive branch what the law requires." Surely then either Gonzales' above testimony requires clarification at the least or Gonzales needs to refute Comey's testimony.

Via mcjoan, Sens. Schumer, Feingold, Kennedy and Durbin are concerned about discrepancies in Gonzales' Congressional testimony concerning the objection of then Deputy Attorney General James Comey to the BushCo warrantless surveillance program:

In very dramatic testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey testified . . . that you and former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card went to Mr. Ashcroft's bedside at George Washington Hospital, where he was in intensive care, in an effort to get him to agree to certify the legality of a classified program that he and Mr. Comey, who was serving as acting Attorney General at the time, had concluded should not be so certified. . . .

. . . You testified last year before both the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Judiciary Committee about this incident. On February 6, 2006, at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, you were asked whether Mr. Comey and others at the Justice Department had raised concerns about the NSA wiretapping program. You stated in response that the disagreement that occurred was not related to the wiretapping program confirmed by the President in December 2005, which was the topic of the hearing.

. . . We ask for your prompt response to the following question: In light of Mr. Comey's testimony yesterday, do you stand by your 2006 Senate and House testimony, or do you wish to revise it?

I have one more for the Senators. During his confirmation hearings in January 2005, Gonzales testified that:

Update [2007-5-10 10:16:43 by Big Tent Democrat]: House Judiciary Committee on the Justice Department starring Gonzo here. I'll add some comment on the hearing below.

Karl Rove, apparently the person most responsible for the firing of the USAs by Bush footstool Alberto Gonzales has got some nerve:

A Republican strategist familiar with Mr. Rove’s thinking said that Mr. Rove, the president’s chief political adviser, “believes it’s in the best interest of the president for Gonzales on his own to resign.” But, this person said, Mr. Rove and other like-minded aides have concluded that “there’s nothing they can do — it’s about the relationship between Gonzales and the president.”

Karl Rove should have resigned long ago, if President Bush's word meant anything. Of course it does not and never will. That is why this charade on Iraq and the GOP we were provied yesterday is so much nonsense. But what kind of a person is Alberto Gonzales? Is he so lacking in personal dignity, lacking in ability to be ashamed, that he will "persevere" in the face of being exposed as an incompetent Bush footstool who is destroying the Justice Department? The answer is yes:

Digby points us to this fine James Fallows article on Thomas Wales, the Seattle federal prosecutor who was murdered, and not grieved, for the suspected motive of his views on guns:

The killing took place on October 11, 2001. . . . [Wales] was 49 years old, and he had spent the previous 18 years as a federal prosecutor in Seattle, mainly working on white-collar crime cases. . . . A significant detail is that one of the civic causes for which Tom Wales worked was gun safety and at the time of his death was head of Washington Cease-Fire. . . . As best I have been able to tell from a distance, through the years law-enforcement and political officials from Seattle and Washington state have frequently complained that federal officials in Washington DC were not putting enough resources or effort into the case. The same Seattle Times story mentioned above goes into one of the disagreements. Everyone on the Seattle side of the story remembers that the Department of Justice in Washington DC sent no official representative to his funeral.

(Emphasis supplied.) No official representation from the Bush Administration at the funeral of a slain federal prosecutor who may have been killed for his services to the security of our country.

James Comey, who we know primarily as the person who chose Patrick Fitzgerald, shows what integrity used to mean at the Department of Justice, as he describes two USA firings he was involved with:

h/t TPM.

According to the NYTimes:

The director of national intelligence, Michael McConnell, said yesterday that the evidence of what is wrong with FISA was too secret to share with all Americans.

This story is both political and legal. Today the DC Circuit ruled that Jim McDermott was not protected by the First Amendment when he released to reporters an illegal tape recording he received from private citizens of Newt Gingrich violating his ethics settlement agreement.

Let's be clear what happened here. Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), sued McDermott because McDermott gave to reporters a tape of Newt Gingrich violating his agreement with the House Ethics Committee.

The en banc DC Circuit agreed the tape was newsworthy. But 4 of the 9 judges ruled that the First Amendment did not protect McDermott's actions, which were alleged a iolation of a federal law. (McDermott challenge to the federal law was an "as applied" challenge, where he argued that applying that law to these particular circumstances violated the First Amendment. 1 concurring judge opined that while the First Amendment would have normally shielded McDermott's actions, because McDermott voluntarily agreed to the rules of the House Ethics Committee, which prohibited such disclosure, he also voluntarily relinquished his First Amendment rights. The interesting opinion here is the dissent. I will discuss them on the flip.