The president seems to have gotten attention of Congress

We have never been reticent about throwing crooked congressmen in jail, whether it be the Mahoning Valley's own James A. Traficant Jr. or California's extravagantly corrupt Randall "Duke" Cunningham. And we'll have no problem at all sending Louisiana's William Jefferson off to a federal penitentiary if it is proved that he's been on the take.
But we do have to express concern about the modus operandi of the U.S. Justice Department in pursuing the case against Jefferson. Never in the 219 years of the constitutional republic has the Justice Department conducted a raid on the offices of a congressman.
This is not a breach of etiquette. The concept of a separation of powers among the administrative, legislative and judicial branches must be preserved. Certainly the administration appears to believe in the principle: Witness how assiduously President Bush and Vice President Cheney have resisted attempts by arms of Congress to gain access to administration paperwork.
Yet, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales apparently had no qualms about more than a dozen FBI agents taking over Jefferson's office in the Rayburn House Office Building for several hours. They were searching for documents that the Justice Department said were covered in a subpoena, but which Jefferson refused to provide.
Gonzales acknowledged afterward that the raid was "unusual."
A harsher view
In an e-mail to congressmen, former House speaker Newt Gingrich provided a more dramatic description, calling the raid & quot;the most blatant violation of the Constitutional Separation of Powers in my lifetime & quot; and suggesting that President Bush discipline or fire & quot;whoever exhibited this extraordinary violation. & quot;
Such disciplinary action would appear unlikely, because the raid was in keeping with this administration's philosophy that the executive branch is not an equal arm of government, but is the pre-eminent arm.
This is simply the latest in a line of actions by the Bush administration that date to its earliest days. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the rationale presented for most of the president's overreaching has been that he is a wartime commander in chief and that whatever the administration does, it does to protect the American people.
But well before 9/11, one of the first things President Bush did was sign an executive order to withhold papers of past presidents from the public, despite a law that called for those papers to become public after 20 years. The order effectively sealed papers in the Reagan administration, during which President Bush's father was vice president.
Also early in the first term, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft circulated a memo government-wide urging agencies to take the most restrictive position on releasing information. He told the bureaucrats that "if you decide to withhold records, in whole or in part, rest assured that the Department of Justice will defend your decisions."
Behind closed doors
The administration defended to the Supreme Court its right as the executive branch to shield from Congress and the public the workings of its task force on energy. Today, as energy costs skyrocket, the public doesn't know which experts advised the administration to do what regarding energy.
The administration also hid from Congress the true anticipated cost of the Medicare Prescription Drug Plan so that when Congress voted, it did so based on estimates that were short by hundreds of billions of dollars.
The president has taken to almost routinely appending disclaimers to legislation he signs, in an attempt to undercut by decree portions of laws that have been passed by Congress.
In the war on terrorism, President Bush has ascribed to himself the ability to declare people to be enemy combatants, subject to indefinite detention without trial. Detainees have be sent to secret prisons and to countries that are known to torture prisoners. The president has claimed for his National Security Agency extraordinary powers in matters of surveillance.
Most of these claims of expanded executive power have gotten scant attention from Congress; some of the issues appear to have been forgotten completely. Perhaps the raid on Jefferson's office will have the effect of forcing Congress to study the pattern that has developed and to ask itself where ever-expanding powers for this president -- or any president -- will lead the country.
If so, Jefferson -- a congressman on the road to almost certain disgrace -- may have performed an unintentional but valuable service to his country. But if he took the bribes he's accused of taking, he shouldn't get any time off for good behavior.