Congress has oversight responsibilities already; there is no need to add another statutory layer to create it. First, Congress needs to know how the criminal law and the departments that it created are working, in order to fulfill its legislative responsibilities. Congress also needs to know how your tax dollars are spent. Second, and perhaps more striking, the House has the ultimate oversight responsibility over the executive: the House can vote articles of impeachment. No one can seriously maintain that firing US Attorneys could never be an impeachable offense, whether or not there is a connection to criminal offenses. Imagine that the President fired ten US Attorneys who were investigating assassination plots against his political rivals. Should Congress just sit on its hands because US Attorneys are can be fired at will? I doubt it.

Steven Plunk:

Assume that the allegations are true that the firings were the result of an attempt to impede corruption investigations of Republicans and to encourage politically-timed corruption and voter fraud investigations and indictments of Democrats in order to help Republicans (even if the US attorney thought the charges were actually bogus). Legal? Not necessarily in all cases, but let’s say that they were legal. Isn’t Congress entitled to investigate whether the White House is directing such a political (read: private) operation through the Justice Department, using your tax dollars, under the authority of laws that Congress itself wrote?

Michael Kinsley praises a David Brooks column that’s behind the NYT subscription firewall, for nailing a distinction that many have failed to make in the controversy over the administration’s firing of eight U.S. Attorneys.
Brooks’s disti…

However, as I have noted in various posts, that is a significant oversimplification of the situation.

Just search on my site for USAs and read the posts.

I have held public jobs before where I worked at the pleasure of a politician and know first hand that, generally, people in that sort of position can be fired for any reason, or even for no reason. It came close to happening to me once; I smelled the stink and resigned before it happened, but am pretty sure it would have, and there would have been no recourse for me. It would have been a completely political move by a new city administration that wanted to get rid of the old people and install some new people.

The administration may have handled the explanation about why these people were fired badly - but if they are presidential appointees, who don’t need to be approved by congress, why does the administration owe a reason to congress or to anyone else in the first place? Did the administration break the law by firing these people? Even if the firings were politically motivated, what does the law say about that? Does it make an exception to the president’s authority to hire or dispose of people for that purpose? Is it specifically laid out? I’m not commenting on the rightness or wrongness of political firings; I’m just positing the question of whether or not it is legal to do so, by the letter of the law.

I wouldn’t submit that the administration does not like to work without oversight. Clearly it does. And yet, there are times and circumstances where, from history and the law, the executive branch is clearly supposed to work without oversight. Just because we see a pattern of gray-area violations by a particular president doesn’t mean that everything he does should be treated that way; when something is firmly within the realm of the executive branch, we should leave it there, pattern of violations or not.

This controversy would not exist at all if congress had not created it. It seems to me that if hiring and firing staff is a presidential privilege, unless we change the law and add an oversight responsibility, whether we like it or not, and whether it’s fair or not, firing these people was a legal action.

That said, what was Congress raking the muck for? Is this really about these attorneys or is something else driving this? Were they looking for explanations (they don’t need) in the hope of catching the administration in a lie or mistruth? If so, it worked, and we were all a party to that entrapment.

Personally I think the whole thing stinks, and I smell stink in both the executive and legislative branches. Shame on the executive branch for handling this badly. Shame on the legislative for the same thing - it’s an equally bold lie to tell the american people that they are trying to do something noble and just by looking out for the interests of these poor fired attorneys who were fired for political reasons, when their inquisition is, at least to me, also clearly politically motivated.

I hope the courts are able to hose them both down because the stench is getting unbearable. If they can’t. . . yeesh. I guess I’ll just have to learn to hold my breath longer because all three branches will be reeking pretty badly.

PS - someone call me on it if I’m wrong about the “employed at will” concept. Admittedly I am not an expert.

I think that making unprecedented moves to shore up the political base of a group of actors who should be somewhat insulated from politics by using a new and largely unnoticed power in a way that at least had the appearance of influencing political investigations (or punishing individuals for not pursuing certain issues) is scandalous. If one doesn’t like that word, then I would say that it is an issue worthy of attention–which is really all that I have argued for.

My main frustration in all of this is the assertion that this is all business as usual, when it isn’t.

a) it involved a new statutory power from the renewal of the Patriot Act.

and

b) there have never been this many mid-term firings of USAs before, let alone in the second term of a presidency.

and

c) Almost all of the past mid-term firings were for malfeasance.

Whatever this is, it isn’t just like the past, as none of this has happened in the past–which, by itself, makes it noteworthy.

Further, there has been a pattern within this administration and DoJ specifically that demonstrates a desire to work sans oversight. Again, this move with the USAs is very much about avoiding oversight–yet another reason to consider it significant.

And yes, human beings make mistakes–but their are mistakes and their is incompetence. I see incompetence here, which is not something I want in the federal government or the DoJ specifically.

Sure it’s been messy and not handled well but that’s not scandalous behavior. These are humans making simple mistakes in human relations. I say again, not that big of a deal.

I would expect the errors in handling this have more to do with unanticipated uproar than with anything being hidden. It was a perfectly legal thing to do that should not have generated this much of a to do.

As for a power grab I think we both agree the firings are not unusual and they are legal. How is exercising a predetermined executive branch power a power grab?

It seems that minor mistakes lead to calls for firings. I don’t see any of this as scandalous or worth a mention in a personel file. If the good Captain (who I really like to read) and Patterico think it’s a problem then I disagree with them. But like any real thinker I can come to a different conclusion than those I admire. Which would include you, by the way.

There are, as you say, some unanswered questions about the firings but I just don’t see the answers as very important. We can’t know everything about everything all the time.

Your defense, while true in a general sense, really doesn’t answer any of the questions that exist in regards to this situation and its handling. We don’t have easy, clear firings here, we have messing, incompetent actions that are suspicious and that have been dealt with via a series of ever-changing explanations.

Yes, the country has bigger problems, but some of those bigger problems has come about because of incompetence within this administration (serious, gross incompetence) and so it behooves us to take more evidence of incompetence seriously lest more problems be birthed. Some of those problems have also derived from this administration attempting to acquire more power than it ought to have. Again, this situation smacks both of a power grab and incompetent actions on the part of the admin. As such, I think it is very important.

And, for the sake of being provocative, I would note that I am not a Democratic member of Congress (nor is Brooks), nor part of the mainstream media, yet I find the situation problematic. Ed Morrissey likewise. Even Patterico, who has attempted to defend the administration, has called for Gonzalez’s firing.

Sometimes unfair things happen in the world. Some of these firings may seem unfair or even be unfair but is that really worth the indignation being shown?

Given that they serve at the pleasure of the POTUS even if it was politically motivated does it rise to a level of constitutional crisis or scandal?

Would a USA’s career really be tainted over this after all of the publicity and the acknowledgement that these do involve politics?

To me (and many others) this is making a mountain out of a molehill. The country has bigger problems and issues that need attention. Washington is a hard knock place and those who choose to play in that particular game know the rules and know what can happen.

My position is not unreasonable or out of the mainstream. Many of us see this as more of an attempt by a Dem congress to embarass the administration in whatever way it can. The press is also looking for something juicy to throw the viewers so the story is hanging around like a bad penny.