FIRING OF PROSECUTORS Bush, lawmakers face off over aides

The Bush administration said it wants to preserve presidential prerogatives.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush has tried for years to reassert a White House right to keep secrets from Congress. Now he must decide how far he wants to go to keep aides from testifying about the firing of federal prosecutors.
If he claims executive privilege and the dispute ends up in court, the fight with Congress will be refereed by a judicial branch that recently has not been kind to the presidency in fights over subpoenas. Lawmakers, meanwhile, risk seeing a judge permanently curtail their power to summon presidential aides to Capitol Hill.
"I don't think anyone would want this in court. If anything is to be politically settled, it's this one," said Louis Fisher, a Library of Congress specialist on constitutional and an expert on presidential powers.
Democrats want White House aides, including political adviser Karl Rove and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers, to testify about their roles in the firing of eight U.S. attorneys last year.
The White House says the aides may meet with lawmakers but insists the discussions must not be under oath or in public. Democrats, who say the firings were politically motivated, want the testimony under oath and in a congressional hearing room.
So far, the Bush administration has characterized its resistance as an effort to preserve presidential prerogatives. Officials have stopped short of even mentioning executive privilege -- an assertion designed to protect executive branch deliberations from disclosure under some circumstances.
In the past
No president has mounted a court fight to keep his aides from testifying on Capitol Hill, Fisher said, but courts have gotten involved in criminal disputes. The Supreme Court ordered President Nixon to provide the Watergate tapes to prosecutors and rejected a request by President Clinton to withhold notes from the Whitewater grand jury. A federal appeals court also ordered Clinton's legal counsel to testify before a grand jury investigating his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
Fights over congressional testimony are normally resolved politically.
Sometimes the White House wins those political tussles, such as when President Eisenhower invoked executive privilege to keep officials from testifying at Sen. Joe McCarthy's hearings. Presidents Andrew Jackson, Calvin Coolidge and William McKinley all successfully stood up to Congress.
Other times, Congress wins out. Nixon reluctantly let aides testify about the Watergate break-in. Presidents Carter and Reagan urged advisers to cooperate in congressional probes. Numerous Clinton aides testified about fundraising and the Whitewater investigation.
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