Linkmeister

The unkindest cut

Y'all know a little about Claude Allen, right? He's the highly-placed domestic policy adviser to President Bush who recently resigned to spend time with his family (yeah, yeah). Well, turns out he was allegedly a shoplifter of sorts, doing a kind of refund scam where you buy an item, take it outside, walk back into the store a day or two later with the receipt, find the identical item on the store's shelf, and "return" it for a refund. That's bad enough, but now the NYT, commenting on the current Congress and its lack of will to perform any oversight of the executive branch, has this to say in Wednesday's editorial:

The founding fathers understood that there would be times in American history when the country lost confidence in the judgment of the president. Congress and the courts are supposed to fill the gap. But the system of checks and balances is a safety net that doesn't feel particularly sturdy at present. The administration seems determined to cut off legitimate court scrutiny, and the Republicans who dominate the House and Senate generally intervene only to change the rules so Mr. Bush can do whatever he wants. (If the current Congress had been called on to intervene in the case of Mr. Allen, it would probably have tried to legalize shoplifting.)

Now that's cold.