ViceZilla’s Views

President Bush’s Executive Order 13,233, which was drafted by AG Alberto Gonzales had holes punched through it by Federal District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.

The order gives either an incumbent president or a former president the right to withhold the former president’s papers from the public. It was issued to block the release of 68,000 pages of records from the Reagan administration, which contain confidential communications between President Ronald Reagan and his advisers, including Mr. Bush’s father, George Bush, who was Reagan’s vice president.

By law, the National Archives has the final say over the release of presidential records, and Judge Kollar-Kotelly ruled that Mr. Bush’s executive order “effectively eliminates” that discretion. It allows former presidents to delay the release of records “presumably indefinitely,” she said.

The ruling was made in a lawsuit filed by the American Historical Association and other organizations, which argued that Mr. Bush’s Executive Order 13,233 was an “impermissible exercise of the executive power.”

Bush’s two terms as President has been an “impermissible exercise of the executive power.”

This is a start to cracking the Bush Administration’s wall of secrecy. Hopefully this is just the beginning in finding out exactly what has been happening behind the Oval Office doors of the Bush Presidency.

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Technorati Tags: Bush, Alberto Gonzales, Executive Order, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, National Archives

Tags: Bush Administration //