WASHINGTON — Rejecting the Bush administration's sweeping assertion of executive privilege, a federal judge on Thursday ordered the White House to comply with congressional subpoenas and let top aides testify before Congress.
However, U.S. District Judge John Bates, a Bush appointee, said that White House aides could cite executive privilege and refuse to answer specific questions once they were in front of Congress.
Bates also ruled that the White House must comply with congressional demands for documents.
The 93-page ruling is a significant defeat for the administration as it seeks to defend its legal justification for not allowing Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers to testify about the firings of nine U.S. attorneys.
More on the story.
Read Bates' summary judgment here.
On a side note from Legal Times:
The judge ended his introduction with an observation from Justice Robert Jackson’s concurring opinion in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer:
While the Constitution diffuses power the better to secure liberty, it also contemplates that practice will integrate the dispersed powers into a workable government. It enjoins upon its branches separateness but interdependence, autonomy but reciprocity. Presidential powers are not fixed but fluctuate, depending upon their disjunction or conjunction with those of Congress.
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