Anonymous Liberal makes a very interesting and under-reported point. In fact, this is the first time I've seen it made anywhere:
As Marty Lederman points out, the relevant statute–28 U.S.C. 541(c)–vests the power to remove U.S. Attorneys with the president ("Each United States attorney is subject to removal by the President.") As we've repeatedly been told, U.S. Attorneys serve at the pleasure of the President–not the pleasure of the Attorney General (and certainly not the pleasure of the Attorney General's chief of staff). The decision to fire a U.S. Attorney–much less eight of them–is unquestionably one for the president to make, so if President Bush was truly out of the loop on this, that's a problem in and of itself.
That level of absenteeism is inconsistent with statutory requirements and with any reasonable standards of good governance. This is far too important a decision to be delegated to subordinates, even if such delegation were legally permissible.
Marty Lederman suggests that this might explain Bush's odd turn of phrase the other night:
"I'm sorry this, frankly, has bubbled to the surface the way it has, for the U.S. attorneys involved. I really am. These are -- I put them in there in the first place; they're decent people. They serve at our pleasure."
I noticed that at the time, too. It was a very, very odd thing for a "unitary" executive to say, but I just chalked it up to his usual inability to speak clearly.
I mentioned this earlier, and both Lederman and AL make the point here again: if the president truly was as out of the loop as Tony Snow claims, claims of executive privilege are a non-starter. Since such claims are in fact being made, it must be the case that Bush was in fact involved. The emails we've seen so far, in fact, indicate as much. The 18 day lull may be based entirely on the fact that the president was out of the country or on Thanksgiving break for a vast majority of the time involved. Within days of his return, the firings had been completed.
As for the claims by many of the pro-adminsitration commenters over at Lederman's place that Bush could have simply delegated his powers to a subordinate, that's possible, yes. But to do so, Bush would have had to sign an Executive Order. So far as I understand, when a statute explicitly names the president as the sole actor, the president can only delegate his power to act through an EO. To allow otherwise would make oversight of the executive branch virtually impossible. So unless Bush did in fact sign such an Order, that means Gonzales and his staff could not have acted without the direct approval of the president.
Nevertheless, all of this is largely irrelevant until we find out why the attorneys were fired. So far we have no reason beyond "our pleasure." But as I said earlier today, that's a how, not a why. We need to know why.
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