Manufactured constitutional "crises"

Rich Lowry:

Practically everything else in American life has been dumbed down, so why not constitutional crises? The braying over President Bush's commutation of Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby's prison sentence is that Bush has undermined the rule of law and the Constitution.

The Founders would be bemused at this, since -- inconveniently for the Scooter-must-hang left -- they included the pardon power in the Constitution. There it is in Article II, Section 2: The president "shall have the power to grant reprieves and pardons." They didn't include a proviso that the power shall not extend to persons vilified by left-wing bloggers as the personification of "the case for war."
Bush can hardly create a constitutional crisis by exercising a plenary constitutional power, and doing it in a way that has become almost routine. The first President Bush pardoned former CIA official Clair George (convicted of lying to Congress), former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger (indicted for perjury) and former National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane (pled guilty to withholding information from Congress). Like the current Bush's commutation, these Iran-Contra pardons violated the Justice department guidelines. And somehow, the republic survived.

...

The Democrats attempts to criminalize political differences led to this pardon and the others mentioned. It was inevitable that they would attempt this objection to the commuting of a sentence in a case that never should have been brought. While they complain about "obstruction" of justice, if justice was what the case was about, Joe Wilson would have been on trial for trying to undermine the war by making false statements about what happened in Niger and his wife would have been investigated for conveying classified information to him that wound up in leaked stories to the media..