A few people have already pointed out that by commuting Scooter Libby's prison sentence instead of pardoning him, the president has ensured that Libby won't talk. He can still refuse to testify because his intact conviction is "under appeal," but he won't have to go to prison - just be on probation and pay a $250,000 fine that Scooter Libby Defense Fund has probably already cut the check to cover. Bush can then completely pardon Libby on January 20, 2009, completing the cycle.

If Libby had been pardoned, he would have no constitutional grounds to refuse to testify on the circumstances of the Plame leak or his own lies to the FBI and the federal grand jury. His choices when subpoenaed again would then have been to commit more perjury, be found in contempt for refusing to testify, or telling the truth - and obviously, none of these were acceptable to Scooter's defenders and bosses.

Yes, it's enraging; you should be enraged that the vice president's chief of staff can commit a treasonous breach of national security for political reasons, lie about it under oath to protect himself, and then never even pay for those repeated and proven lies. (Proven lies, by a unanimous jury verdict. It's not a case of "he really can't remember." It is confirmed, legal fact that Libby deliberately and with malicious intent lied to the FBI and to the grand jury.)

TPM Muckraker reports:

According to a senior aide at the House Judiciary Committee, the committee is planning a hearing on the commutation, "as early as next week."

Too bad. You can argue all you want that the constitution does not have a theory of the "unitary executive" (it doesn't), or that the president doesn't have to obey laws passed by the Congress (he does), but the constitution's grant of absolute executive clemency is clear.

Article II, Section 2, paragraph 1:

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.

They can look into it all they want; they can hold hearings on the actual leak, on the run-up to war, on the investigation, and they can impeach the president or vice president if they want. They can look into the president's commutation decision - but there is absolutely no limit on the president's power to do this in the constitution, and there's simply no constitutional theory that can punish him for exercising a clearly stated constitutional power.

All the stuff that led up to it, yes - but not the decision itself. If you're mad, be mad that your elected officials let it get this far.

Update: This bit of hackery is the final straw for me for Slate, now just an extension of Fred Hiatt's editorial organization. All the RSS feeds, bookmarks, everything - gone. The sentence was not harsh, no vice presidential chief of staff would have "gotten off with probation" because his position is an integral part of the offense, and Noah says that if impeachment was too harsh for Bill Clinton, prison is too harsh for Libby.

Noah asks, "Is it really fair to treat White House aides more harshly than presidents?" Well, let's see - Libby was convicted of lying to obscure the treasonous act of exposing national intelligence secrets for political expedience, by a jury of his peers, in a court of law, by a prosecutor and judge of his own party appointed by his own president. Bill Clinton was impeached by a GOP-controlled lame duck House of Representatives and tried by a GOP-majority Senate that clearly would have removed him from office if it had 66 votes, all for allegedly using the wrong verb tense when he described a blowjob, whether deliberate or not.

So now, eight years later, Noah argues that because the GOP overreached in impeaching a president for a non-crime, the GOP must now be immune from punishment for actual, proven, treasonous, terrorist-helping crimes. He calls this "principle." What an unprincipled beltway hack. I actually paid for a Slate subscription back in the time of impeachment, but there's obviously nothing useful left there.

Update II: Digby nails it, as usual, the "it" being Slate this time.