This was all i really wanted to see happen....back to where we were before the Patriot Act

.......with only 2 against.....i think we can be sure the right and left agreed on this one overall.




WASHINGTON (AP) - The Senate voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to end the Bush administration's ability to unilaterally fill U.S. attorney vacancies as a backlash to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' firing of eight federal prosecutors.

Gonzales got a morale boost with an early-morning call from President Bush, their first conversation since a week ago, when the president said he was unhappy with how the Justice Department handled the firings.

Also, the Senate by a 94-2 vote passed a bill that would cancel the attorney general's power to appoint U.S. attorneys without Senate confirmation. Democrats say the Bush administration abused that authority when it fired the eight prosecutors and proposed replacing some with White House loyalists.

"If you politicize the prosecutors, you politicize everybody in the whole chain of law enforcement," said Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.

The bill, which has yet to be considered in the House, would set a 120-day deadline for the administration to appoint an interim prosecutor. If the interim appointment is not confirmed by the Senate in that time, a permanent replacement would be named by a federal district judge.

Essentially, the Senate returned the law regarding the appointments of U.S. attorneys to where it was before Congress passed the Patriot Act, including the unilateral appointment authority the administration had sought in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks.

No tears here for that Fashist assault on freedom.

Good, now let's get rid of the Un-Patriotic Act completely.

Didn't this same thing happen with Bill Clinton and Janet Reno?


Wasn't there unilateral silence on that matter?

No Clinton fired 93 attorneys instead of 8.

Isn't this what happens when the DA's of the country fail to do their jobs correctly?

Well we wouldn't want to fire US Attorneys that fail to prosecute voter fraud cases. We need those convicted felons, dead people and their dogs to keep voting Democrat. It's just amazing how the sheeple bite on every idiotic non-crisis the Dumb-O-Craps throw out there. They killed this country 30+ years ago when they took over the education system and started handing out diplomas to dumbasses that can't even read them.

Funny how they had to throw a bone to the Judiciary to try to make it SCOTUS proof... I wonder if it will work?

The point i was originally making a couple weeks back, and which the press is for some reason ignoring is that Bush/Gonzalez were using a provision designed for emergencies to appoint DAs without any congressional over sight. Clinton and company didn't have that back door provision...they did it too, but the did it the right way, they way it had been done for a long time and with checks and balances.

If Bush had used the traditional way on the books before patriot act....i would not have had much problem with it, there are always political hirings and firings, but but there is an existing system of how it should be done. Bush tried to abuse an emergency provision in the Patriot act in non-emergent situations. If there was nothing underhanded going on, why not just use the traditional method with congressional approval which is still on the books?

I simply believe in holding our elected officials to a higher standard, if they are to represent us should they not be as ethical as we are or more?

My point:
George W. Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales are taking a lot of heat from Democrats lately for allegedly discharging some U.S. attorneys for political reasons. Of course, the president has every right to fire any political appointee in his administration for any reason, political or otherwise. In hindsight, it would have been far better if the administration had just said so from the beginning instead of wrongly implying that the attorneys were fired for cause.

Nevertheless, Democrats will continue to milk the issue for all it is worth in an effort to create a scandal and embarrass Bush by possibly forcing him to fire his close personal friend Gonzales. It may not be fair to Gonzales, but that's the way the political game is played in Washington. As they say, if you want a real friend here, get a dog.



Then-United States Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales, center and White House senior adviser Karl Rove, left, as they attend the swearing-in ceremony for the Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings at the U.S. Dept. of Education, in this Jan. 31, 2005 file photo in Washington. The White House is being pulled further into the intensifying probe over federal prosecutor firings amid new questions about top political adviser Karl Rove's role and as Republican support for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales erodes. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File) However, Democrats should be wary of pressing Bush too far because there is ample precedent on their own side of Democratic presidents who fired U.S. attorneys and other high-ranking officials just to halt investigations of their political allies. For example, two Democratic presidents—Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman—worked for years to protect a notorious racketeer named Thomas Pendergast because he ran a Democratic machine in Missouri.

Pendergast's criminality was on display for all to see in Kansas City, where his organization openly ran prostitution, drug and gambling operations in the 1930s. He was also the recipient of a vast amount of graft, which was dutifully paid by all of his henchmen, including Truman, who ran the Pendergast machine in Jackson County, Missouri. There's no evidence that Truman enriched himself from Pendergast’s corruption, but he was dutiful in making sure that inflated county contracts went to Pendergast’s cronies, who paid Pendergast a cut for the business.

In 1935, an assistant secretary of Commerce named E.Y. Mitchell, who was a Missouri native, tried to get the Roosevelt Administration to do something about all the corruption in Kansas City. Mitchell was told repeatedly to shut up and mind his own business. When he would not, Roosevelt fired him.

That same year, however, Pendergast's greed got the better of him—he had a severe gambling addiction and lost the equivalent today of millions of dollars per year on horse races. Pendergast took a big kickback from the insurance industry for fixing a regulatory problem for it in Missouri that came to the attention of federal authorities.

U.S. Attorney Maurice Milligan, with the support of Federal District Court Judge Albert Reeves, went after Pendergast. After failing to convict him on influence peddling, Milligan pursued him for not paying taxes on the income—the same technique that had led to the downfall of gangster Al Capone in Chicago. In 1939, Pendergast was convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to federal prison, breaking his power once and for all.

While the federal investigation into Pendergast was still ongoing, Truman, who was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1934, tried to get Milligan dismissed. In 1938, he attempted to block Milligan’s reappointment as U.S. Attorney even though he was a Roosevelt appointee with the support of Missouri’s other Democratic senator, Bennett "Champ" Clark.

On February 15, 1938, Truman personally filibustered Milligan’s reconfirmation by the Senate, calling him incompetent, immoral and guilty of using "Hitler-Stalin tactics." Time magazine called Truman’s speech "one of the bitterest…ever heard on the Senate floor."

Despite Truman's efforts, Milligan was endorsed by the Senate and went on to bring down his close friend and mentor, Pendergast. But Truman never forgot what he had done. Within days of becoming president in 1945, after the death of Roosevelt, one of Truman’s first acts was to fire Milligan. When Attorney General Francis Biddle protested Truman’s action, he fired Biddle, too.

In other ways as well, Democratic presidents have long used federal law enforcement agencies for political purposes. Roosevelt often had his political enemies audited by the Internal Revenue Service. He also used the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate and tap the phones of journalists and newspaper publishers who opposed his policies.

In the 1960s, President John F. Kennedy, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and President Lyndon Johnson also used the FBI and IRS to investigate and harass their political opponents. As is well known, they bugged Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s phones and hotel rooms just to gain political intelligence—falsely justifying their actions on the grounds that King was in league with the Communists.

The point of this history lesson is not to excuse or justify anything Bush and Gonzales may have done, which seems mainly stupid rather than malicious, but to suggest that Democrats would be wise not to push their protests too far. Their own presidents have done far worse with less justification. That's a fact.



He didn't let them go for political reasons. They refused to prosecute cases. When it's for political purposes, I'm behind you 100%.

Great history lesson!......no doubt there has been abuse on both sides over the years. Had i been around and politically minded at the times of those other events i would probably have made a stink as well, but no one really would have heard it.....how did we ever survive without the internet?....of course it is the internet that lets the world hear of these events....it is no longer very easy to keep stuff like this guiet.....which i think is good in most cases, keeps'em honest....i should hope!