Bushies vs. the House, Part 2068

Did anyone notice there seems to be a constitutional crisis going on?

On Friday, Dallas-based lawyer and ex-White House counsel Harriet Miers no-showed the House Judiciary Committee under orders from her former bosses. Today is the last day for her to show up before she faces the possibility of contempt of Congress charges or the even more esoteric inherent contempt charges.

Today is also the last day for the Republican National Committee to hand over documents about the U.S. attorney firing scandal. Of course, this raises the question of why exactly the RNC had documents about this issue and whether the president is going to claim executive privilege covers not only his staff, but everyone he has ever looked at.

Now the committee has canceled another meeting because the Department of Justice refused to make Voting Section Chief John Tanner available for questioning about his role in the Georgia Photo Identification Law debacle. For those of you too busy to even keep track of all the multifarious voter suppression (whoops, we mean ID) measures in Texas, the Republican-authored bill would have forced Georgia residents to provide a government-issued photo ID to vote. Now where Justice comes in is that its lawyers looked at the bill before it was passed – and said it would be unconstitutional. The very next day, Tanner overruled them and told Georgia the bill was fine and dandy.

Now the question is: If Congress starts handing down contempt charges against past and present White House and Justice staffers, will Attorney General Alberto Gonzales actually enforce them?