The Bushist (really Cheneyite) legal fantasy that the Vice Presidency is a creature of Congress now has a preliminary injunction standing against it.
Some fun excerpts:
[B]oth Ms. O’Donnell’s Declarations and Defendants’ pleadings are bereft of any legal analysis demonstrating that Defendants’ interpretation is correct as a matter of law or any identification of legal authority that would allow Defendants to place limitations on the PRA’s statutory language.
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Nor has Ms. O’Donnell offered any factual grounds on which the Court could determine that Plaintiffs’ allegations–that Defendants have misinterpreted the PRA–are unfounded.
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Defendants were unwilling–in lieu of litigating Plaintiffs’ Motion for Preliminary Injunction–to agree to preserve all records potentially at issue in this litigation, and to treat them as if they were covered by the PRA until a decision on the merits of Plaintiffs’ claims could be issued. Defendants were only willing to agree to a preservation order that tracked their narrowed interpretation of the PRA’s statutory language.
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The American public, however, has a right to the preservation of all records encompassed by the
PRA’s statutory language.
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[C]ounsel for Defendants argued that any preservation order need not bind all Defendants. As the Court noted during that conference call, however, Defendants have not established a factual record to support their counsel’s assertion. Defendants’ Opposition and Response likewise fail to provide factual support for defense counsel’s assertion. Accordingly, on the current record and based on the fact that Plaintiffs’ Amended Complaint alleges that all Defendants have, in various ways, improperly interpreted the PRA’s statutory language, the Court must conclude that its preliminary injunction should, at this time, bind all Defendants to this action.
3 comments:
About time some athourity of the
public tightens the reings on these
loose stallions.
I also think they should do away with the Presidential pardon crap.
No, Cheney's argument is even more absured that stated here. He says that he's a member of neither the executive or legislative branches, since the constitution attaches his office to the Senate, where the VP presides as President. What? Talk about circular reasining.
If there is any justice left in America, Dick Cheney and George Bush will be the first American executives to go to prison for the crimes they've committed in office.
Anon at 8:50: That's what I thought based on media reports, but what the OVP argued in this case is more subtle. In the end, they might have revealed that the documents they wanted to preserve under the Presidential Records Act as pertaining to the OVP's executive branch activities were absurdly limited, but in their arguments over the preliminary injunction, they at least pretended that such documents do exist.
As for Leavenworth for a whole lot of them, starting with Duhbya and Darth, amen!
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