Citations Could Be Voted on By Full House before Thanksgiving

Last summer, Bush flunkies Josh Bolten, the White House Chief of Staff, and Harriet Miers, Bush’s former lawyer, secretary and erstwhile Supreme Court nominee, failed to show up to testify before the House Judiciary Committee about Bush’s firing of eight U.S. attorneys for political reasons in 2006.

Finally, on Monday, the Judiciary Committee answered the affront:

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) filed a contempt citation against the White House with the House clerk Monday in a last-ditch effort to cajole testimony from chief of staff Josh Bolten and former legal counsel Harriet Miers relating to the firing of several U.S. attorneys last year. If Democrats decide to take up the measure and it passes — two actions that are anything but certain — a constitutional clash would ensue over separation-of-powers issues.

Sources in the capitol say Bush’s former brain Karl Rove is also in the committee’s crosshairs.

Contempt of Congress is a federal misdemeanor, punishable by a maximum $100,000 fine and a maximum one-year sentence in federal prison.

The problem, of course, is that if the House votes to issue the citations, it would fall to a loyal Republican, Jeffrey A. Taylor, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, to enforce them. Taylor was appointed by former Attorney Gen. Alberto Gonzales, and because he was appointed on an interim basis, confirmation by the Senate. (And, because of an amendment to the Patriot Act, which he helped draft as a Senate staffer, interim appointees have term limit. Nice trick, that one.)

The law compels Taylor to “bring the matter before a grand jury for its action,” but since this is unlikely, the Congress does have another option: Miers, Bolten and Rove could be thrown in long-unused jail cells in the basement of the capitol.

Conyers has said the vote by the full House on the contempt citations could be held before Thanksgiving.