Don't forget. It might continue

This came in a couple hours ago from Patrick Leahy's office:

In a few minutes the Senate will have an opportunity to begin restoring accountability and checks and balances to our Government.  We should pass the Preserving United States Attorney Independence Act, S.214.  We need to close the loophole exploited by the Department of Justice and the White House that contributed to the mass firings of United States Attorneys.  When we roll back this excessive authority given the Attorney General by the PATRIOT Act reauthorization, we will take a step toward restoring the independence of federal law enforcement in this country.

It passed 94-2.

Remember, it's not terribly obvious that Bush, Rove, and Gonzales did anything illegal. It just smells very, very bad. But Bush is still president and his apparatchiks are still his apparatchiks and, as it stands, thanks to the PATRIOT Act, he can, through Gonzales or Gonzales' replacement, still hand pick U.S. Attorneys if there should be any more honest or coerced openings.

If the president vetoes this, it'll be interesting to see if the Congress (Republicans) will stick to their guns and override him, and, if they do, what sort of specious unitary executive legal argument Bush's team will use to ignore that constitutional mandate.

Update: When this bill was being marked up in committee, six Republicans (Kyl, Sessions, Graham, Cornyn, Brownback and Coburn) tried to keep it from ever making it to the full Senate. When their efforts failed, they ALL voted IN FAVOR of the bill on the floor, presumably because they knew the bill would pass and presumably in the hope that nobody would notice their quick, er, flip flop.

This isn't uncommon, but it does indeed speak to the above question about whether the Republicans who voted for this bill would vote to override a veto.