OMG teh Chimperor will rule 4ever!!!1!!
Without possibility of successful Chimpeachment.
The law says that bureaucrats who spend money outside Congressional appropriation are personally liable for that money. It can be expected that a Democratic administration coming in in January 2009 would be interested in pursuing such people. No matter what fealty you think you owe the present President, it's not worth losing your house and savings over.
5:"It can be expected that a Democratic administration" ...No, it can't.
LB:"I still have a fair amount of faith in the bureaucrats not to go along, en masse, with open disregard of unambiguous law..." ...I don't.
"...that the relevant civil servants would obey..." No, they won't.
I strive for Unfogged style brevity, and by using sentences of less than 5 words, perhaps even better grammar.
I ain't italicizing or otherwise html'ing, cause that like always screws up half a thread
5: "The law says that bureaucrats who spend money outside Congressional appropriation are personally liable for that money."
I Am Not A Lawyer, but it sounds like pardons would take care of that.
"It can be expected that a Democratic administration coming in in January 2009 would be interested in pursuing such people."
Similarly, an incoming Republican administration in 2009 would be interested in pursuing any hold-outs.
5, 7: I am a lawyer, and I'm not sure what Jim's talking about. It's an area where there could certainly be something I don't know about, but a law making bureaucrats personally liable for a 'good-faith' error in how money is to be spent seems unlikely.
On the likeliness of the whole thing, I just think that this is an area where normal stolidity and following procedures would serve us well. You wouldn't need a lot of holdouts to foul everything up for a defiant administration, and I think you'd be guaranteed to get a fairly large number of people who, political appointees or not, would honestly not understand why they shouldn't do their job normally this time.
The "are the even worse than we think they are" "issue" which I was thinking of right before reading this post is why liberals are engaging in arguments, like this one, with the premise that the declassified NIE is a good faith effort to report the intelligence services' view of Al Qaeda. One reason to accept this premsie is that, since it says things are pretty bad, it doesn't
Sorry folks, we had to liquidate washerdreyer in order to protect the freedom of everyone else.
It's somewhat scary that we should even be having this conversation.