Hastert Grabs Bush's Lifesaver

Dennis Hastert has taken the gift that President Bush gave him and grabbed the lifesaver that Captain Ed refered to. Here's a portion of Hastert's op-ed in Friday's USA Today:
If the information we have read about the behavior of Rep. William Jefferson, (D-LA), seems as obvious to a jury as it does to me, he deserves to be vigorously prosecuted. I do not want to do anything that will interfere with that prosecution.

The issue that has concerned me, as Speaker, since Saturday night is not if the FBI should be able to search a member of Congress' office, but rather how to do it within the boundaries of the Constitution.

On Thursday, President Bush recognized that serious constitutional issues needed to be resolved. He wisely directed the Department of Justice to send the documents (taken from Jefferson's office last weekend) to the Solicitor General's office for safekeeping for 45 days. This was a meaningful step. The president also encouraged the Justice Department to meet with us.

Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and I directed the lawyers for the House to develop reasonable protocols and procedures that will make it possible for the FBI to go into congressional offices to constitutionally-execute a search warrant.
Hastert is wise to have grabbed the lifesaver that Bush tossed him by having the DoJ seal the evidence seized from Jefferson's office for the next 45 days. Peoples' first impression, which they held incorrectly, was that Congress saw itself above the law. I didn't think that at any point. My complaint in all this was that Hastert was standing on shaky constitutional ground. I understood that he simply saw this as a turf war, not whether William Jefferson should've been prosecuted.

This op-ed is a good first step in dispatching this issue from the front pages of America's biggest papers. I suspect that this will be forgotten by the middle fo next week.

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Cross-posted at California Conservative

Posted Thursday, May 25, 2006 10:54 PM

Comment 1 by richard mcenroe at 26-May-06 08:17 AM
translation: YIKE! That water was COLD!

Mr. Hastert should take as a guiding principle for future life that ANY notion he can come up with, with which Nancy Pelosi agrees, is by definition a bad idea.

After six years, you'd think he'd learn that.

Comment 2 by Gary Gross at 26-May-06 09:03 AM
Good point, Richard.

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