OK, back to the real scandal on the US Attorney purge: Who screwed the constitution?

[enough]

This was posted by babylonsister yesterday, but it got lost in all the excitement. Needs to be read in entirety.

Specter Detector
U.S. attorney scandal update: Who's to blame for those alarming Patriot Act revisions?
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Monday, March 5, 2007 (Slate)

http://www.slate.com/id/2161260/fr/flyout

snip>

But as the political scandal spreads, the question at its heart gets less and less public attention: Who changed the Patriot Act to make it easier to replace U.S. attorneys without oversight, and how did it happen with nobody looking?

U.S. attorneys are well aware that they serve at the president's pleasure, but new wording in the Patriot Act made it worth the president's while to fire a big, fat lot of them and hire a group of new ones. And while certainly half the scandal is that the Justice Department did that—let eight U.S. attorneys go, seemingly for no reason—we seem to have forgotten that even without the mass firings, this law had been changed in the sneakiest way imaginable.

snip>

{Senator Arlen} Specter added that he only looked into how the provision was altered after Feinstein told him about it. As he explained, "I then contacted my very able chief counsel, Michael O'Neill, to find out exactly what had happened. And Mr. O'Neill advised me that the requested change had come from the Department of Justice, that it had been handled by Brett Tolman, who is now the U.S. attorney for Utah, and that the change had been requested by the Department of Justice because there had been difficulty with the replacement of a U.S. attorney in South Dakota."

snip>

So, Specter concedes that the item is controversial. He denies knowing about it. That implies it was O'Neill who slipped the new language in, and misled Specter and the Senate. And yet, at least as far as I can tell, nobody in power has said a word about O'Neill's conduct, and not one iota of blame has been laid at his doorstep. Joe Conason noted in Salon last month that 1) O'Neill is a former Clarence Thomas clerk, and 2) he joined Specter's staff at the same time Specter was fighting accusations of being wobbly in his fealty to the White House.

snip>

It's a good thing that the ousted U.S. attorneys will testify before the House and the Senate. It will clear up a good deal of confusion about the Justice Department's claim that there was something wrong with their job performance. But it seems to me that that's precisely 50 percent of the scandal here. And there are some other folks deserving of subpoenas as well. Mr. O'Neill and Mr. Tolman spring to mind. The outrage isn't merely that the Justice Department abused its power to hire and fire. The real scandal is that it rewrote federal laws to do so, yet nobody seems to know who did it or why.

[izzie]

1. Either the job or being a Sen. is to big for them or they are not

spending enough time doing it. Running over the country trying to be Pres. would be a good thing to stop plus this endless finding money. What they need is free time on our air waves for each to run and no money going to private firms for ads. We seem to have endless things put into bills for the Pres. to get more power then to hide it he hides the paper work as Bush has done with the Pres. before him. A govt. done in the dark will not work in a country like ours. We end up with no country. I do not wish an autocrat.

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2. Lunchtime kick.