‘Contempt’ is the word

Maybe the White House thinks it can just run out the clock until January 2009. Nearly two years have come and gone since the world first learned of the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program; what’s another 17 months in refusing to comply with Congress’ subpoena of the administration’s legal rationales for eavesdropping on U.S. citizens?

This is what we’ve come to in Year 7 of the Bush/Cheney White House: The administration defends its seemingly illegal surveillance program by having the vice president snap, “either we’re serious about fighting the war on terror or we’re not.” Then, citing vague but ominous-sounding “chatter” about an impending terrorist attack, it steamrolls a weak-kneed Democratic-controlled Congress to pass an emergency expansion of spying authority under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, even though few if any members know the methods or extent of the NSA’s activities.

When the Senate asks not for operational details but for the White House’s legal reasoning behind them, so that senators can more effectively amend the underlying statute, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney -- using separate legal teams, perhaps under Cheney’s bizarre theory that his office belongs to a fourth branch of government -- invoke their favorite presidential tool, executive privilege.

In the dog days of a Washington August, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) declared Monday that he’s had enough. Almost two months since the Senate subpoenaed the legal documents, and two years since the Senate Judiciary Committee began asking for them, White House lawyers are still stalling, citing “national security” whenever possible and withholding documents that by every definition of the term are the people’s business. “Right now,” Leahy told reporters, “there’s no question they’re in contempt of the valid order of the Congress.”

The chances of criminal contempt charges being filed against the president and vice president are remote. Yet the word holds true in its literal sense. Bush and Cheney express contempt for U.S. legal traditions, and for the citizens who pay their salaries, every time they block another innocuous White House document from seeing the light of day or claim authority for the executive branch that might have made even Richard Nixon blush. They have governed in secret, leveraged the politics of fear and mocked the very concept of checks and balances. If the next 17 months are uncomfortable, they’ll have no one else to blame.