Superlegality

This comment just came through on a Kos post about Goodling's refusal to testify.

We can either sort delicts and torts (crimes and suits) via public institutions, or by private means.

In the latter instance, there are no rules of evidence or telling or adjudication. None whatsoever.

In that world, quibbles over things like Miranda, modes of interrogation and incarceration as a suspect just aren't very important anymore.

Perhaps Miss Goodling would prefer that world.

So far, it's just been a world where certain execrable persons can be declared outlaws in the Norse sense -- outside the protection of law -- by executive fiat.

Now we see the other side of extralegality -- super-legality -- that certain exalted persons can be declared outside the prosecution of law.

The first goes inextricably with the last. We are in Monica Goodling seing the tentative beginning of a claim that due process is only valid if undertaken by persons deemed impartial and just not by the accused, but by the person called for testimony, on the grounds they don't like the people asking for answers to their questions.

Of course, when persons deemed acceptable are in control, that's different.

That, ultimately, is the basis for Miss Goodling's discomfiture. For whatever motive, she declares that any cooperation with Congress is a threat to her person, that this threat is illegitimate, and that she will not comply...the suggestion being that the administration will back her up should Congress seek to compel her appearance.

That might not happen. Then again, it might.

If so, we are far, far closer to a breakdown in not just this current investigation, but in our system of government.

Like I said at the top; either we resolve disputes -- delicts and torts - via the institutions that were trusted (more or less), regardless of who is in control, or we throw away twelve hundred years of experience reaching back to the Magna Carta, and look to old-school Sicily and modern-day Russia for idea on how to best take the law into our own hands, when resolving conflicts between persons and parties.