The Daily Background

The Scandal
The House of Representatives voted yesterday to kill a little-known PATRIOT Act provision which literally no member of Congress knew about until it was discovered that the Administration was using it to skip Senate confirmation for US Attorneys.

The Senate already scrapped the provision last week, and now that the House has too, it’ll go to the White House where the President cannot veto it (well he can, but it would be instantly overridden, because it already has more than the required 2/4rds support in both chambers).

The DoJ has so far refused to comment on the stunning decision by top Gonzales aide Monica Goodling to invoke the Fifth Amendment to refuse to testify before Congress about the scandal– indicating that she is afraid of incriminating herself. This may suggest that there could actually have been some actual criminal conduct in the scandal.

Meanwhile, Smart People^tm are trying to figure out whether they’d rather be Attorney General Alberto Gonzales or Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty at this point. It’s a hard choice, since both of them look rather screwed at the moment.

Also, Novak wrote in his column yesterday that “[Gonzales] is the least popular Cabinet member on Capitol Hill, even more disliked than Rumsfeld was. The word most often used by Republicans to describe the management of the Justice Department under Gonzales is “incompetent.”

Senate
The Iraq funding bill with March 31st, 2008 withdrawal deadline could actually pass sometime this week (consideration/debate on it continues today). More on that later this morning.

House
Yawn. Nothing too interesting.

Iraq
3,242 (3,241 yesterday).

Filed under: Z-The Daily Brief, Z-TDB Blog