With a contempt vote for EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson and White House official Susan Dudley looming in the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, today’s announcement President Bush is asserting executive privilege over documents related to EPA’s new ozone standards and its denial of California’s clean cars waiver wasn’t a huge surprise in a sense.

After all, as others have noted, the administration has danced up to the precipice of executive privilege arguments and contempt votes on more than one occasion over the last six months or so; and moreover, delay and delay some more seems to have become the key modus operandi here. And any revelations by Rep. Waxman’s investigation won’t alter the simple fact that the California waiver denial was completely and utterly extralegal and unprecedented, relying on an imaginary analysis of the Clean Air Act that simply made things up where convenient. As Rep. Waxman puts it:

The Clean Air Act is clear about what can be considered and what cannot be considered when EPA makes decisions udner its authority. In both cases, the EPA’s methodical and scientific process pointed to specific outcomes. In both cases, the outcome dramatically changed when the White House became involved.

Yet it is still contradictory– belief that these documents should be privileged and desire to continue running out the clock aside– that the White House has decided to pursue this claim. A huge part of EPA’s argument that it did not act improperly on the California waiver decision rests in claims that Johnson had expansive leeway, granted by the same Clean Air Act, to make the final decision and to consult the White House in doing so. It’s a bogus and unprecedented argument (more legal background on why here), and one partly rooted in the controversial “unitary executive” theory that the Bush administration has embraced elsewhere, but it’s one they appeared to have cast their lot with.

Or perhaps not, in wake of today’s announcement. After all. if these documents only reveal a proper delberative process that resulted in legally-defensible judgments, why go through all this drama to hide them?

The reality that shining some light on the process might not reveal this purported model of good governance– and might instead reveal a decision-making process that focused on politics and policy preferences, even though the law was deliberately written to constrain those factors– is obvious to those of us who put no faith in the administration’s legal arguments, of course. It’s just telling to see once again that the administration also seems to lack any faith, whatsoever, in the staying power of its own legal approach.