Bush calls time-out

President Bush has sealed for 45 days all documents obtained during the FBI’s raid on Congressman William Jefferson’s office last weekend in a move designed to buy time for negotiations between Congressional Leaders and the Justice Department.

Following last week’s raid, the first of its kind in our nation’s history, Congressional leaders, specifically Speaker Dennis Hastert, have claimed that the move violates the Constitution’s Separation of Powers clause and that the documents should be sealed and/or turned over to the House Ethics Committee.

For anyone concerned with justice in this matter, the Speaker’s solution is not acceptable. The House Ethics Committee has proven itself to be run by partisanship and the House has proven time and again in recent history that it cannot root out corruption (I’d argue that media coverage forced Randy “Duke” Cunningham and Tom DeLay to resign their seats while the House Ethics Committee has been remarkably inept at rooting out and punishing members for ethics violations). For several months at the beginning of the current Congress the Ethics Committee refused to meet due to partisan squabbling about the make up and division of powers within the Committee. There is no reason to believe that the House Ethics Committee would act in a clear and decisive manner to hold Rep. Jefferson accountable for his actions – as they should have immediately after it was discovered that he had more than $90,000 stuffed in his freezer in his home.

The FBI raid was unprecedented. And, if the FBI had taken any governmental records or Congressional property, my opinion on this issue would be markedly different. However, all reports are that the FBI seized only documents on Jefferson’s personal computer and information relating to donations to his legal defense fund.

The FBI was right to act swiftly and decisively to root out corruption inside our Federal government. It’s too bad that Congress couldn’t have acted earlier to police itself.