Congress can enforce its own orders against recalcitrant witnesses

It's amazing what all you can find out reading The Next Hurrah comments. Here Frank Askin, professor at Rutgers School of Law, and director of the Rutgers Constitutional Litigation Clinic, writing in the Washington Post, suggests:

So long as Congress is investigating issues over which it has the power to legislate, it can compel witnesses to appear and respond to questions. That power has been affirmed over and over in prosecutions for contempt.

In modern times, this congressional power has been enforced by referring contempt cases to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia for indictment and prosecution. That, of course, is the rub. It allows the president to exercise his plenary power under the Constitution to issue pardons "for offenses against the United States."

But no law says that indictment and prosecution by the Justice Department is the exclusive means to enforce congressional prerogative.

Thus, the congressional alternative. Instead of referring a contempt citation to the U.S. attorney, a house of Congress can order the sergeant-at-arms to take recalcitrant witnesses into custody and have them held until they agree to cooperate -- i.e., an order of civil contempt. Technically, the witness could be imprisoned somewhere in the bowels of the Capitol, but historically the sergeant-at-arms has turned defendants over to the custody of the warden of the D.C. jail.

For the complete piece click here.

I'm sorry, I can't help it, he's so egregious

From Scott Horton, Harper's Magazine.

For those of you who missed the testimony of Alberto Gonzales before the Judiciary Committee, I’d recommend making the effort to catch it on a CSPAN rebroadcast. There’s simply no way to adequately describe the whole scene: that creepy, evasive visage, calmly churning out falsehood after falsehood. You have to keep reminding yourself—this man is the attorney general of the United States. He is the physical embodiment of an idea. At this point no one, Democrat or Republican, would argue that he is highly qualified to hold the position he now occupies, that he is the obvious choice among America’s legions of lawyers to be the attorney general. He was chosen and installed as the exaltation of personal loyalty and fidelity over all other traits, especially intelligence, honesty, loyalty to the law and especially the Constitution. Gonzales stands for the willingness to lie and dissemble in order to protect his patron; he is the ultimate and absolute politicization of high office. His selection and installation reflect the values of a tyranny, not a democracy...


Robert Conquest wrote that the Soviet Union was the only nation with a completely unpredictable past. But meet Alberto Gonzales. He was extremely busy rewriting history today, and it now appears that when he raises his hand and swears an oath, there’s no telling which version of the past will appear next. First, he tells us that the trip to see Ashcroft in the hospital has to do with something entirely different from the Terrorist Surveillance Program about which his former Deputy James Comey testified. In doing this, he contradicts his own prior testimony, and he contradicts Comey. At least one person is lying. And indeed, that person has to be Gonzales. The only issue is which of his diametrically opposed statements is the lie...

Tuesday, July 24. All in another day’s testimony for Alberto Gonzales, the worst attorney general in the history of the United States, the man who has come to embody the lawlessness and immorality of the Bush Administration.

For the rest of the list of Gonzales' lies and a few capital offenses according to Horton, click here.

Has Gonzales No Shame?

How did we get here? How is it that Gonzales is still the attorney general? What will the history books say about this administration? Has Gonzales no shame? Has Bush no shame? I recognize that TPM has edited the testimony, but all the various reports on his testimony suggest it is one of the low points of the history of US Attorney General's Office.

Wales 2

That first day in Wales - Friday - after helping Alice get her tent up, we had a late lunch. Here you can see Winton (from Wales) and Eli (from Anchorage.) Eli was the pool manager at the University for years and is originally from Germany. She is now a sculptor and has an outdoor 'studio' along the beach somewhere in Anchorage where she builds natural, temporary sculpture in the manner somewhat of Andy Goldsworthy. And just a part of Barbara's face. She's a writer from New Jersey who has been a museum curator and has done extensive work with Alaska Native art and has spent a great deal of time in Alaska. There were so many interesting people.





And here Joe's wife Catherine is talking to Lena. Both Lena and Winton were important participants in the writing workshop. Both have lived in Wales their whole lives and know so much about the history, the natural world, and the social world of Wales.

















There was a picture earlier of Marie on her four wheeler going out to get water. Well, in Wales they still use honey buckets. There's a white bucket with a plastic garbage back in the 'toilet' on the right. When this gets filled, someone has to take it out and dump it.



There are little honey bucket stations all around town. Here is someone coming back from dumping. Think about it. Alaska has a Permanent Fund of savings from oil income (and more recently investments on that income) of $40 billion. This fund pays annual dividends to all the citizens of Alaska. Last year it was around $1000 per person. And yet we have people living in villages that still don't have running water and decent sewage systems.

I'll try to get a little more up each day. My mom and daughter are both here visiting. Yesterday we had a triple birthday party - my daughter, me, and a friend, Alex - and we've got lots to do so I can't do too much at once.

Most of the pictures can be enlarged somewhat by clicking on them.

Wales - 1

Tryying to figure out how to post about Wales, I've decided to let my pictures structure the story and go in chronological order. There are lots of overlapping stories here, but rather than isolate them out, I'll let them unfold (or not) as I experienced them. For the beginning of this Wales trip including maps go to July 18, 2007.

We got the flight go-ahead at 11am on Friday and flew into the Wales airport on a new Beechcraft. Here we are at the airstrip in Wales with our luggage out. Four-wheelers were out at the airport to pick up luggage and we walked the ten minutes to the community center, passing grassy marsh land.


We had to decide where to stay. People had sleeping bags to put in offices in the Community Center, several of us brought tents. Alice, who's from Bethel, wanted to sleep out on the beach, so I went along to see if that would work for Joan too.





On the way we passed Marie who was going a little out of town to a large pond to fill up on water. Wales doesn't have running water. People said they did, but it was chlorinated and the State health people said that wasn't safe. So now they get the same unsafe water, but they have to get it in buckets. Or so that is what I was told.





Alice gave a warm hello to everyone we passed and the warmth was returned by all. A group of kids followed us to the beach. Shawna, the one in the hooded sweatshirt, became a buddy She's also the daughter of Joanne and Tony who were both participants in the writing workshop. Alice got her tent up on the beach, despite warnings by locals that it would get extremely windy and blow away. She piled rocks on all the stakes and in the tent.





Walking back through town to the Community Center after Alice's tent was up. In the end, Tony convinced me to put our tent just behind the community center so we wouldn't have to walk so far.

Back from Wales in Sunny Nome

We spent Thursday night in Nome because Wales was fogged in. There were six residents of Wales who joined the ten of us (plus our workshop facilitator Kim) who came from outside. With Alice (from Bethel) and Joe (from Wales) we had more Alaska Native participants than non-Native.

The people of Wales were incredibly hospitible and we share a lot. I'll blog more and post lots of pictures when we get back to Anchorage, but I'm just taking a moment in the Nome library to get back on. The sun is shining here in Nome. (We only had about an hour of sun in 3.5 days in Wales, that was after the drummers had been practicing for two hours one evening.) It was warm enough that I put on my shorts at the beach and tested the waters of the Bering Sea.

We have a few hours to wander the beaches of Nome and see if we can find a few birds that normally we can't see.

Nome Detour

Flying into Nome - Bering Strait [Norton Sound on the Bering Sea] in the background.




Kim, the workshop facilitator, has a brand new Mac Book so I can keep blogging as long as we have internet connections. Here he is as our luggage gets moved to the Bering Air office.

We checked in, got all our luggage weighed, sat and talked, before finding out that it was foggy in Wales and that we couldn't take off.








Bering Air's bus took us to the Airport Cafe in town which looks like hip coffee shop anywhere for lunch.










Downtown Nome sits right on the Bering Strait.





Then we walked into town to visit Faith's library. Faith is one of the group members who works for the Reindeer Bridge Project, to draw the connections among the Arctic Indiginous peoples who herd reindeer.







Every hour Catherine calls the Bering Air office to see if we can fly.



Right now we're in the visitors center and Catherine is calling places to stay. The weather is lifting somewhat here in Nome. Four o'clock call was a no-go. If we can't fly out at 5pm, we spend the night in Nome.

Nome Stop

Wales is fogged in. We're in Nome. Going into town. Checking on weather later.

Headed for Wales, Alaska

All the photos in this post can be enlarged by clicking.

This may be the last post for several days. Joan and I are headed to the Westernmost point of the North American mainland, the village of Wales. (There are some islands further west.) Our friend Joe was born and raised in Wales and has put together a small writing workshop there. We couldn't refuse such a great invitation.

The top map of North America is from Joe's 1971 book Give or Take a Century and was done by Joe as are all the illustrations. On the Atlas map of Alaska, you can see Anchorage in the lower right and Nome on the left. Wales is a little above Nome (Under Little Diomede which is an island a mile from Big Diomede. Little is in the US and Big is in Russia).





This last map is another Joe drew of Wales almost 40 years ago. We'll see if it still is useful.













Here's the cover page of the book.














This is the beginning of the chapter about Wales in Joe's book. Click on it to enlarge.

Pulling Out of Iraq

Rosa Brook's July 13 piece from the LA Times helped crystallize some questions I've been having about the calls for withdrawal from Iraq.

Basically, the same people saying we should withdraw from Iraq are saying we should do something about Darfur. It is hard to get a good sense of exactly what would happen if we withdrew - whether our presence is the problem or whether our withdrawal will open the flood gates for even worse violence.

As bad as Saddam Hussein was, the lives of Iraqis appear to be much worse today than before we invaded. And under Hussein, Iran was kept in check. And even those of us who can say we didn't vote for Bush and that we opposed the war from the beginning, have some responsibility for not protesting louder and more effectively. It is the US that has gotten Iraq into this situation. Now that we've totally mucked things up, can we with a straight face say, "Ooops, sorry, we screwed up. Better leave now."

Brooks' article critiques the basic arguments being offered both for and against withdrawal including mine above. The issue, of course, is about our ability to accomplish a better outcome by staying than by leaving.

Clearly we have obligations to the Iraqi people. But are we capable of meeting those obligations? I think one key strategy is to get other countries involved in the peace keeping. When the war began, companies from countries that didn't support the war were kept out of the contracts in Iraq. Cheney's company, Halliburton, has profited hugely from the war. Perhaps France and Germany might have more interest in helping keep the peace if their companies got part of the action.

It's clearly an incredible mess, largely of our own making. Will our withdrawal help wind down the violence? I suspect things will get worse before they get better, and in the end, Al Qaida and/or its allies will control the oil of Iraq. Way to go George.