Steve Benen at the Carpetbagger Report talking about the Bush administration's insistence that a White House assertion of executive privilege can't be challenged by Congress and reviewed by the the Justice Department:

What I want, more than almost anything, is for Republican lawmakers to go on the record as saying the White House -- any White House -- has the authority to define the scope and limits of its own powers. Congress is irrelevant; the courts are irrelevant. A president, including a Democratic president, can claim executive privilege and be accountable to no one. Go ahead, GOP, I dare you.

What I want is for the Democrats in Congress to put their Republican colleagues on record. Bush claims the executive branch has the right to do this? Fine -- then the Democrats should draft legislation that embodies the Bushies' claim and makes it the law of the land, for Bush and for all future presidents ... including the next one, who, according to virtually everyone in the Beltway, will almost certainly be a Democrat.

To drive the point home, the bill should be co-sponsored by Senators Clinton, Obama, Biden, and Dodd, and, in the House, by Congressman Kucinich.

Come on, Repubs. Is your president asserting a legitimate constitutional principle, or is he making a naked power grab? Here's your chance to tell us what you think.

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By the way, note that the administration is basing its executive privilege claim on "a Justice Department legal opinion during the Reagan administration, which made the same argument in a case that was never resolved by the courts." And who was responsible for that opinion?

In defending its argument, administration officials point to a 1984 opinion by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, headed at the time by Theodore B. Olson, a prominent conservative lawyer who was solicitor general from 2001 to 2004.

Yup, Ted Olson -- the head of Rudy Giuliani's "Justice Advisory Committee." If you like outrageous claims of executive privilege, I think you'd love a Giuliani presidency.