Remember Alexander Butterfield?
John Ashcroft does.

In July of 1973, during Watergate hearings in the Senate, a stalemate was brewing. Charges made by John Dean, in his testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee were beginning to look as if they could not be confirmed.  Then, during Alexander Butterfield's testimony, a White House aide responsible for scheduling and record-keeping, a question was asked that Butterfield felt he could not evade answering.  Sam Dash, lead counsel of the Senate Select Committee on Watergate, asked about a taping system at the White House.

Butterfield had been willing to evade and dance around the questions, but he had promised himself that he would not lie.  In response, he admitted that there was a secret taping system and that it was controlled by the President. This was the break that led to the downfall of President Nixon.

In John Ashcroft's recent testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, he appears to have learned from Butterfield's lesson.  Unfortunately, the lesson he learned was to avoid making the "mistake" of admitting the truth when directly asked.

Ashcroft was confronted with questions from Senators Kennedy, Leahy and Biden about the recently revealed memo from Justice Department laywers. These lawyers had written a memo offering legal justifications for the use of torture, arguing that under the given circumstances, the Geneva Convention did not apply, that the President could order and immunize from prosecution those who carried out the order, to torture suspects in the pursuit on the "War On Terror".  Kennedy asked Ashcroft if the president had ever authorized torture or anything approaching torture.

First, Ashcroft tried to avoid answering the question.  Then, when that didn't work, he offered a non-denial denial, stating that the President had not issued any directives that broke laws passed by the Congress or in violation of any international treaty by which the United States was bound.  Since the memo makes the case that such an authorization, if issued, would not be in violation of the law or treaties, it was a transparent dodge.  When that also failed to settle the issue, he simply refused to answer the question and then refused to provide the full text of the memo.

Now this is where things get very dramatic. To deny a Congressional committee a document requested in pursuit of it's oversight responsibilities, you have to have a reason.  Ashcroft pretended to invoke executive privilege, but denied he was doing so when asked if that's what he was invoking.  Eventually, he admitted he was invoking nothing.  At this point, Senators started loosing their last bit of patience.  Well, Democratic Senators.  Kennedy reminded him him that he's been in Congress and knows very well that he has to give a reason for refusing such a request.  Biden gently suggested he was in contempt of Congress before baring his teeth and growling that we signed the Geneva convention in part, because it helps protect our soldiers from being tortured if they are taken prisoner. Republicans were apparantly willing to let him claim they had no business asking such intemperate questions. 

So, among the growing list of Constitutional crises that the Republican control of Congress is allowing to fester, the administration now claims not only the right to torture, but allows the Attorney General of the United States, the head of the Justice Department and top legal official in the government to flaunt the law and the Constitution. Clearly, if we want to retain our democratic institutions and remain a country governed by laws and not the arbitrary authority of an unchallenged executive, it is our civic duty to evict the Bush administration from office.  And while we're at it, we should probably also remove some Republicans from Congress who don't believe in the rule of law.