Times Silent on Latest White House/Rule of Law Controversy

Unless the New York Times is hard at work on some groundbreaking assessment of the White House's latest attempt to define itself outside of the rule of law, I'm going to chalk up today as a big Zero on the Grey Lady's journalistic scorecard. I have yet to find any mention of what the Post chronicles today in great detail: the Bush White House's directive that the Justice Department ignore Congressionally-initiated contempt charges when they are directed against White House officials, as long as case is one the president doesn't want investigated. "A U.S. attorney would not be permitted to bring contempt charges or convene a grand jury in an executive privilege case," according to an unnamed administration official. In other words, according to one Democratic lawyer, "Because we control the enforcement process, we are going to thumb our nose at you."

While all of this is occurring in the context of the scandal around the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, the White House isn't stopping there. They argued yesterday that Congress not only should be powerless to use its contempt power to investigate the current scandal, but that whenever the president decides to assert his executive privilege, the entire machinery of investigate justice in the federal government stops. To be more precise, the White House believes that Justice Department is forbidden from investigating White House officials any time the president decides he doesn't want them to.

Does this constitute a constitutional crisis? How does Bush/Cheney's present assertion of executive privilege compare with Nixon's view of the same? Good questions, which the New York Times apparently believes don't need answering.