"My Oath, Like Your Oath, Is to Uphold the Constitution"

This is some good indignation right here from Senator Pat Leahy (D-VT) in response to Sara Taylor's view that her oath of office was an oath of personal loyalty to George W. Bush:

Expressing good, old-fashioned outrage isn't my strong suit since I'm really way too soaked in the culture of irony. But this kind of thing is almost beyond outrageous. The lack of self-awareness that has to go into a person who knows she under fire saying something like that, as if she genuinely has no idea that public officials are supposed to uphold the law and the constitution.

Comments

For intelligent outrage, Leahy is hard to beat in the political sphere, as Greenwald is in the blogosphere.

I do wonder about the pernicious effects of irony; didn't a hip young novelist write a tract against irony as a 'destructive force' a decade or more ago, incapable of building or preserving anything (in this case, the Constitution)? Maybe the irony-soakage of the elites in this country is one of the biggest factors in the severity of the current crisis.

Posted by Ben Cronin | July 12, 2007 8:53 AM

The her hair flip tells me she's unconvinced by Leahy's argument.

Posted by stm177 | July 12, 2007 8:54 AM

Really, one can easily determine what Taylor's respect is for the Constitution--when rightly berated by Leahy, and as he spoke, she was saying 'mmm hmm,' and 'yeah,' as if she was being asked if she wanted a large fries with that order.

So dismissive of our Constitution, and what it means to take an oath to uphold it. These people aren't Americans.

Posted by terraformer | July 12, 2007 8:59 AM

haha, Leahy rocks.

no no, fuck you Dick Cheney

Posted by Chad Okere | July 12, 2007 9:28 AM

She misspoke, and she says so. She says her oath to the constitution means she must protect the constitutional executive privilege; Leahy responds with the non sequitur that her oath is to the constitution, not the president. Matt is impressed by this, which is the closest thing to an outrage that I see.

Posted by Thomas | July 12, 2007 9:36 AM

Personally, I've gotten past irony and now it seems that everything I see is tinged by surrealist dadaism.

Posted by SGEW | July 12, 2007 9:38 AM

Ben

i bet you're thinking of David Foster Wallace, who wrote an essay called (i'm pretty sure) 'E Unibus Pluram: T.V. and U.S. Fiction' that should've been subtitled 'the death of irony'.

it's in his excellent book of essays 'a supposedly fun thing i'll never do again'.

Posted by josh bivens | July 12, 2007 9:50 AM

She says her oath to the constitution means she must protect the constitutional executive privilege

No she didn't, at least not in that clip. She said her oath means she should "respect her service to the president." Leahy's response was not a non-sequitur at all.

Posted by Led | July 12, 2007 9:51 AM

She misspoke...

The term you were looking for was not "misspoke." You were looking for the term "made a Freudian slip." This isn't exactly rare in the Bush administration. Way too many political appointees forgot that their duty was to serve the American people and thought their job was to serve the president (see: Powell, C., Ridge, T., and Tenet, G.).

Posted by Tyro | July 12, 2007 9:56 AM

"book of essays 'a supposedly fun thing i'll never do again'"

for which my review was titled "a supposedly good author i'll never read again." shorter review: yech.

Posted by Doug | July 12, 2007 10:02 AM

Ben C:

The hip, anti-irony crusader you mention is one Jedediah Purdy, author of For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today

Posted by hotspock | July 12, 2007 10:07 AM

That smarmy bitch needs a good spanking -- Leahy should take her over his knee -- right there on the Senate floor!

He can say it's "Legislative privilege", which would make about as much sense as the "privilege" Taylor is claiming not to have to testify.

Posted by moron | July 12, 2007 10:25 AM

"She says her oath to the constitution means she must protect the constitutional executive privilege ..."

Please direct me to the portion of the consitution that refers to this "executive privilege" of which you speak. I'll wait.

Posted by too many steves | July 12, 2007 10:47 AM

Hotspock: Ben said "novelist". The overrated David Foster Wallace is probably who he meant, tho ISTR that Doug Copeland wrote something similar.

Posted by lemuel pitkin | July 12, 2007 10:50 AM

I think I was thinking of Wallace, but Purdy is also pretty apropos. However, I found him a bit -- I don't know, too much, which perhaps is a result of my own immersion in irony-culture.

Posted by Ben Cronin | July 12, 2007 10:50 AM

If you look at Taylor's bio you will see that she was National Co-Chair of the College Republicans. I think this is important if you have followed the development of that organization, which apparently has some of the most vicious internal politics imaginable. Rove, of course, was the head of college republicans in his day. The point here is that these young people are trained from an early point in their political lives to engage in tactical fights with one another to gain power within the party and to extend the party's power in the society. They are not interested in the political process as part of civil society more generally. By extension, the leader of the party becomes the most important figure and the object of all of their idealizations. To challenge the leader is to challenge the party and thus to challenge the asperational world they have succeeded in. A few days ago there was a piece in the NYTs about Putin's young supporters who ask prospective members of their group to name the greatest achievements of Putin. This sounded to me to be very similar to what apparently went on in the selection of people to work in Iraq immediately after the occupation began. In both Russia and the US Republican party a cult of personality has taken over from a commitment to the country.

Posted by George H. | July 12, 2007 11:06 AM

Wow. You can see where the dissonance forces her to disengage. I would bet that she barely heard what he was saying, and that she still has the same understanding of her oath.

Posted by Megan | July 12, 2007 11:12 AM

"The hip, anti-irony crusader you mention is one Jedediah Purdy"

This is the first time I've heard anyone describe Purdy as "hip". From reading the profile about him in the NY Times Mag years ago, the impression I got was that this Harvard grad who was home-schooled by hippy-dippy parents was a self-styled Gen Y William F. Buckley, except more of a dork.

As for David Foster Wallace: Has anyone here honestly read Infinite Jest? What an awful genre the "look how smart I am" door-stoppers are. I read Gravity's Rainbow, years ago, which does have some worthy parts (plus lots of crap an editor was too cowed to cut), but since then, no mas.

Posted by Fred | July 12, 2007 11:43 AM

I guess 'Clear and Present Danger' isn't on the viewing list for the college Republicans.

"You took an oath, if you recall, when you first came to work for me. And I don't mean to the National Security Advisor of the United States, I mean to his boss... and I don't mean the President. You gave your word to his boss: you gave your word to the people of the United States. Your word is who you are. "

Posted by Rob | July 12, 2007 12:09 PM

WHat I think the investigating committees should do is publicaly announce that all investigations will be kept open until Jan 21, 2009. If there's a Democratic President in office then, pardons and commutations, and executive privilege will be off the table. The Bush people will have to face the law unprotected, and will be liable for their past contempt citations.

Posted by John Emerson | July 12, 2007 12:10 PM

"WHat I think the investigating committees should do is publicaly announce that all investigations will be kept open until Jan 21, 2009."

Why not publicly announce that the fishing expeditions will continue until 2011? Think big, John! Never mind that committee memberships may change slightly in composition by then, what with elections and all.

Posted by Fred | July 12, 2007 12:20 PM

Executive privilege doesn't end with a change in administration.

Led, she served as an assistant to the president, and, he has directed her to not testify, based on a constitutional privilege. She is respecting that directive.

too many steves, is that meant to be some sort of clever point? Have you always been skeptical of claims of executive privilege, or, like so many Democrats, are you just a hypocrite?

Posted by Thomas | July 12, 2007 1:20 PM

WHat I think the investigating committees should do is publicaly announce that all investigations will be kept open until Jan 21, 2009.

A new Congress will be sworn in a few weeks before that, so I don't think this is an option.

I was just chatting with my boss about this and commented that you'd think that none of these idiots ever took civics, and she told me that in TN civics hasn't been required in public schools for decades (she's in her mid-forties). That left me pretty much speechless; we were required to take one semester each of civics & state history, one year of US history, and one semester of government to graduate, and this was in the Mississippi public schools.

Posted by latts | July 12, 2007 1:21 PM

Yes, I've always been skeptical of claims of executive privilege, and no, I'm not a Democrat.

I'm still waiting for someone to tell me where this "executive privilege" can be found in the constitution.

Posted by too many steves | July 12, 2007 1:38 PM

Remember: when you're trying to find out information about an elected official abusing their powers, it's a fishing expedition. When you're trying to find out about an affair, it's a matter of national interest.

Posted by Nobody Important | July 12, 2007 2:02 PM

steve, it's right before the provision that gives Congress the power to make the executive disclose internal deliberations.

Posted by Thomas | July 12, 2007 2:03 PM

*ahem*

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL30240.pdf

Some nice summer beach reading for y'all

Posted by jonathan | July 12, 2007 2:44 PM

Foster Wallace gets a pass for the title essay of the book alone. Never before have I laughed so hard at the idea of being on a cruise ship.

Posted by Mike P | July 12, 2007 3:08 PM

Taylor said this:

"I took an oath to the president, and I take that oath very seriously."

Stick that in your pipe, Thomas.

And the wider point is this: Taylor, like so many thirtysomething Bush cultists, went directly from Texas politics or the College Republican / RNC apprenticeship into the White House. She thinks nothing changed when she moved her office.

And Megan's right: her response to Leahy is ever so much 'yeah, yeah'. She simply doesn't believe it, even if she's forced to save face. She's loyal to her liege-lord like a flunky in the ancien régime. Or, to reiterate, like a cultist.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | July 12, 2007 3:14 PM

Hey Douching Thomas- Are you Uncle Clarence to Al's Aunt-onin ScAlia? Seriously, right wing zombies like you would justify anything to serve the greater GOP. The college republicans learn from early on to put power before propriety, and party before people.

too many steves, is that meant to be some sort of clever point? Have you always been skeptical of claims of executive privilege, or, like so many Democrats, are you just a hypocrite?

I think that the invocation of Clinton has replaced the Hitler rule in the Repub lexicon. Anything George W. is accused of is truer of Clinton to the nth degree. George could rape an infant because Bill raped a fetus, etc.

Posted by Gregorio | July 12, 2007 6:17 PM

Gregorio, what kind of crypto-racist garbage is that?

I'd think that, if the charge of hypocrisy doesn't sting (and I know it doesn't, because you don't have the requisite self-awareness), then perhaps a reminder that many Democrats are optimistic that there will sometime soon be a Democrat president, and it might be nice for some little bits of the constitutionally granted powers of the office to remain at that time. (Of course, being hypocritical now wouldn't prevent you from spinning around and being hypocritical later, but you might have a harder time persuading less partisan or braindead members of the public.)

Posted by Thomas | July 12, 2007 11:03 PM

latts, just speaking as a Tennessean, I was required to take Civics in high school and I graduated in 1996. So your boss was wrong.

Posted by Trickster Paean | July 13, 2007 12:07 AM

Is it crypto-racist to call a spade a spade? Clarence Thomas is a loathsome careerist pig with severe racial and sexual insecurities who takes it out on the constitution. Calling that butcher an Uncle Tom is doing his evil-eyed zombie ass a favor.

Democrats believe this system can be reformed. Guys like me know that as long as fucktards like you are allowed to vomit forth their uninformed "opinions" and present them as reasonable discourse, any chance at reasonable political progress is nil. I believe in pressure politics, but mostly I just long to see Cheney's baboon heart pop in a vise like one of Gallagher's luckless watermelons. Let the pundits and bloggers lap up the mess.

Posted by Gregorio | July 13, 2007 3:33 AM

Gregorio, nice to see that I can add "fascist" to the list as well. How I long for the days when there were liberals on the left.

Posted by Thomas | July 13, 2007 11:39 AM

Once again, a grasp of simple political terms eludes you. I am no fascist as I believe not in the corporate stranglehold of the state or rank manipulation of chauvinism and nationalism. I am merely a good old-fashioned Marxman with patches on my elbows holding my nose as the mobile abattoir of Capitalism rolls by, and from its sulphurous, reeking wake, the shining silvery horseless stage of Scientific Socialism shall emerge, with room for all on moderately cushioned seats and nary a chance of turning pumpkinwards by midnight.

Posted by Comrade Gregorio | July 13, 2007 12:17 PM