"He may be an imperial president, but he's our imperial president."

When Harriet Miers refused to show up in front of John Conyers' committee, he said, "If we do not enforce this subpoena, no one will ever have to come before the House Judiciary Committee again." When the chairwoman ruled that Miers' claim of executive privilege was invalid, Republicans objected saying Dems were overreaching, and a party line vote on finding her in contempt followed.

I suspect, but hopefully I'm wrong that there will also be a party line vote before the full House.

After that, who knows, although John Dean and lefty blogs have noted that the president appears to be inviting a constitutional fight over Miers. That he and his Justice Dept lawyers appear to believe that our now conservative federal judiciary will rule in their favor.

I'm beginning to have a very sickening feeling about all this. That THIS may have been what stacking the courts with conservative judges was all about.

Thanks to "the current GOP establishment and its apologists," this is some legacy that conservatives are gonna be stuck with...

I don't know that Goldberg really has much evidence for the part of his claim that Democrats would be happy for a Democratic president to have such powers. I can't imagine that Democrats would have been happy to trust Pres. Clinton with the kind of lock-'em-up powers that Pres. Bush has claimed for himself. The Democratic Congress in Clinton's first two years weren't in even the same ballpark of ludicrous lap-dogginess that the GOP Congress has been for Pres. Bush. Congressional Democrats tend to enjoy their oversight powers, when they have them.

And JohnS's point is given extra substance by today's news:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/19/AR2007071902625.html
"But administration officials argued yesterday that Congress has no power to force a U.S. attorney to pursue contempt charges in cases, such as the prosecutor firings, in which the president has declared that testimony or documents are protected from release by executive privilege."

David:

"And it doesn't matter if Bill Clinton did any of the things President Bush has done first."

Tell us how this is possible?

(I think you need to parse the "first" as modifying "Bill Clinton did".)

Man, that Goldberg column is a typical dishonest doozy of his, isn't it? Such as how he invoked Wilson's actions without noting that Wilson had to get Congress to pass a law allowing those actions? Or his invocation of Filegate, for which the Whitewater investigation ultimately found no criminal wrongoing, nor any connection whatsoever up to the Clintons? Gotta love the totally undeserved scarequotes he deploys around "accidentally"... what a complete ass. Pretty much everything that man writes contains excellent reasons to ignore the rest of everything else that he writes, and this recent column is no exception.

I need to parse a direct quote?

Well, yeah, inasmuch as you need to parse every single sentence that you comprehend! (Maybe you don't know what "parse" means...?)

Anyway, usually there's not a lot of choice as to how to parse what, but in the sentence in question, the "first" has two different clauses it could grammatically be modifying, so it is structurally ambiguous. Your sense that the sentence is saying something impossible is due to your parsing it to modify "President Bush has done", but the better parsing would have it modify "Bill Clinton did".

That reply made my hair hurt.

lol anon, if I had any hair I would pull it out trying to decipher.

Anon:

how about: "It doesn't matter if Bill Clinton first did any of the imperial things George Bush has done (or been accused of)".

One reason why many of us support small government is that the "good guys" won't always be in power. Or, the "good guys" often turn out to be "bad guys."