Showdown

The White House is declining to say whether the Obama administration will support legislation introduced by Senate Democrats that would roll back the use of the “state secrets privilege,” one of Bush’s most controversial legal tools.

The White House’s silence on the bill will give more fodder to critics who charge that Obama has broken a campaign promise to dramatically scale back use of the Bush legal maneuver and wants the latitude to use it himself. It also sets up a potential showdown with Senate Dems who continue to view the legislation as crucial to rolling back Bush-era abuses.

Making this particularly dicey, the original co-sponsors of the bill when it was first introduced in 2008 included then-Senators Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, now both top members of Obama’s administration.

The legislation — which represented the consensus view of the Democratic Party a year ago — would drastically limit use of the state secrets privilege, which is the invocation of national security to justify government secrecy and get anti-government lawsuits tossed out of court. The bill was reintroduced this year by Senators Russ Feingold, Patrick Leahy, and Ted Kennedy in response to Obama’s use of the legal tool, with Feingold calling the need for the legislation “urgent.”

  The Plum Line