Senate Votes to Change Way U.S. Attorneys Appointed : Bloomberg.com

[groovychk]

Originally published at Twixel.net. You can comment here or there.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aW8o9TK8SUN8&refer=home

March 20 (Bloomberg) — The Senate voted 94-2 to repeal a year-old law that Democrats said gave Attorney General Alberto Gonzales too much power to name temporary U.S. prosecutors without senators’ consent.
The legislation was proposed by California Democrat Dianne Feinstein following the disclosure that eight U.S. attorneys were dismissed last year as part of a Bush administration effort to replace them with other political appointees.
The firings triggered investigations by two congressional committees into whether President George W. Bush’s staff injected politics into law enforcement.
They also prompted calls for Gonzales’s ouster by several top Democrats and at least three Republicans.
“We need to close the loophole that the Department of Justice and the White House exploited that facilitated this abuse,” Senator Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in floor debate.
The little-noticed 2006 provision, added to the extension of the USA Patriot Act, allowed the attorney general to make temporary appointments of U.S. attorneys for indefinite periods of time.
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Yet another indicator of the wonderfulness that is the Patriot Act. Good grief.