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Kinda creepy coincidence
I was reading this mediocre essay by Jonathan Chait on Robert Bork, and I was struck with an impulse to read up on the Watergate scandal. What’s the link? Bork had been Solicitor General at the time Nixon tried to quash the investigation, and had wound up in charge of the Justice Department after the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General had both resigned rather than fire the investigator. Bork did the firing.
This led to the creation of the Office of the Independent Council, a check on the growing power of the executive. I’d known that the office had since expired, but I hadn’t known when: At midnight on the 11th of September, 2001.
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akawil tells me that this isn’t quite as eerie a coincidence as it might seem: The reason it expired then was because that was the first day Congress was back in session after summer recess; since Al Qaeda was aiming to hit Congress with United Airlines Flight 93, they’d chosen this day. But it looks to me like the recess ended the previous Tuesday, Sep 4th.
This led to the creation of the Office of the Independent Council, a check on the growing power of the executive. I’d known that the office had since expired, but I hadn’t known when: At midnight on the 11th of September, 2001.
akawil tells me that this isn’t quite as eerie a coincidence as it might seem: The reason it expired then was because that was the first day Congress was back in session after summer recess; since Al Qaeda was aiming to hit Congress with United Airlines Flight 93, they’d chosen this day. But it looks to me like the recess ended the previous Tuesday, Sep 4th.
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Bork's defenders like to point out that it was all choreographed ahead of time, with everyone doing what they felt they had to do, including leaving somebody around to actually run the department. But Bork could have chosen not to be that somebody, had he felt that firing Cox was not a conscionable act of executive power.
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Ah, the Talk page for that entry mentions a July 3, 1987 editorial in the Boston Globe.
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