Regardless of what excuses we may end up hearing to the contrary, the Democrats have no real choice but to AT THE VERY LEAST charge Harriet Miers with inherent contempt of Congress for having ignored a Congressional subpoena under "orders" from President Bush. They simply have to do this. Otherwise, they will be giving their implicit agreement to Bush's new assertion that the law is whatever he says it is.
This is no time to be gauging potential risks/benefits for the Democrats with regard to future elections, though unfortunately I expect the Democrats to get bogged down in exactly that, as usual. If that happens, then the value of supporting them as any sort of decent alternative to the GOP more or less drops to nil. I say this as somebody who has consistently supported the Democratic Party since coming of political age over 20 years ago.
This is the big one, folks. This cuts to the core of what we are as a nation. The president of the United States has not only insisted that he and his inner circle are above the law, he has now gone so far as to specifically order one of his cronies to break the law.
Let me say that again, because oddly enough I don't quite believe it myself... President Bush has deliberately and blatantly ordered somebody to break the law.
This is considerably more than merely a debatable policy disagreement, wouldn't you say? When I say that the Democrats have no real choice but to at the very least charge Harriet Miers with inherent contempt of Congress, I mean of course that what they really need to do is to take it further than that and to go after Bush himself for what is a fairly clear-cut case of obstruction of justice. Last time I checked, it was just as illegal to order somebody to ignore a subpoena as it is for the other person to ignore the subpoena. That President Bush insists that anything the president does is by definition legal obviously does not make it so.
Personally I don't want to see a Democratic president assuming autocratic power any more than I want to see a Republican president doing so. That's not what we're supposed to be about, this country of ours. It's what countless Americans have supposedly fought and died to prevent.
Sadly, I know that the Democrats will almost certainly cave on this one, just as they've caved on every other significant battle since Bush took office. They always seem to make a lot of impressive noise about this sort of thing, and yet ultimately it all usually comes to naught. We will undoubtedly be lectured on the unacceptable political risks of fighting the Executive Branch on this, along with a boatload of accompanying justifications. And in the end, our nation will be handed yet another defeat, and one which it can ill afford.
The Democrats absolutely HAVE to fight this battle tooth and nail. To hell with the "risks" involved... this is their fucking DUTY.