Lederman at Balkinization pulls this quote from US District Judge John Bates’s 93-page opinion in what he calls the “Miers/Bolton contempt case”:
There are powerful reasons supporting the rejection of absolute immunity as asserted by the Executive here. If the Court held otherwise, the presumptive presidential privilege could be transformed into an absolute privilege and Congress’s legitimate interest in inquiry could be easily thwarted. . . . [I]f the Executive’s absolute immunity argument were to prevail, Congress could be left with no recourse to obtain information that is plainly not subject to any colorable claim of executive privilege. For instance, surely at least some of the questions that the Committee intends to ask Ms. Miers would not elicit a response subject to an assertion of privilege; so, too, for responsive documents, many of which may even have been produced already. The Executive’s proposed absolute immunity would thus deprive Congress of even non-privileged information. That is an unacceptable result. [emphasis changed]
[Marks’s and Marchetti’s The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence] is the first book the federal government of the United States ever went to court to censor before its publication. The CIA demanded the authors remove 399 passages but they stood firm and only 168 passages were censored.[2] The publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, chose to publish the book with blanks for censored passages and with boldface type for passages that were challenged but later uncensored. [emphasis added]
And it’s not just some vague association: the resemblance is genetic. These administration’s claims of an “imperial presidency” or a “unified executive” are being made by Nixonian Restorationists—“the best and the brightest of the Ford administration.” (And, if you’d like, you can follow it full circle: from the Marks/Marchetti book to the Church Committee, to intelligence tendencies being restrained, to the current administration’s chafing.)