my suspicion is cheney and gonzalez came up with it, and told bush what he was going to do.

Keep guessing.

This is just another example of overexcitable dems claiming that President Bush is doing something new and outrageous, as if he's the first to do it, or somehow pushing the bounds beyond all prior governments. See also "preemptive war" and "international wiretaps" and "questionable pardons."

Yesterday, dems characterized the recent executive order as "a bold new assertion of executive authority." In reality, he's just echoing the conclusions of prior administrations, including Presidents Reagan and Clinton.

Today, in the Washington Post:

But administration officials and other legal scholars, including some Democrats, noted that Justice Department lawyers in the Clinton administration made a similar argument during a controversy with Congress over the nomination of a federal judge.

Walter E. Dellinger III, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department then, wrote in a 1995 legal opinion that "the criminal contempt of Congress statute does not apply to the President or presidential subordinates who assert executive privilege."