Remember when Democrats screeched about an “imperial presidency” when George W. Bush asked Congress for authorization for military action, and when he fired executive appointees in the Department of Justice?  Good times, good times.  In the past few weeks, we’ve been treated to a new war without the President bothering to check with Congress at all, and now one of his key appointees telling Congress that she has better things to do than answer their questions:

White House adviser Elizabeth Warren, in a heated House hearing Tuesday, touted the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as a vital new financial-markets cop while Republican lawmakers slammed the agency as a powerful financial regulator with too few checks and balances.

The Harvard professor also rejected one House Republican’s accusation that she gave misleading testimony to Congress in March and was lying about her schedule.

Her schedule?  Actually, it was Warren who accused the committee of reneging on an agreement that they would end the hearing in one hour.  Warren claimed that they had agreed to work around her schedule, and that she had important meetings to attend:

Mr. McHenry and Ms. Warren also got into a spat over how long the hearing should run. Ms. Warren said the committee had agreed to end the 1:15 p.m. hearing at 2:15 p.m. so she could make it to a meeting.

The lawmaker accused her of making up the agreement.

“You might want to have a conversation with your staff,” Ms. Warren replied.

Really?  What meeting might Warren have that would be more important than a Congressional hearing into the activities of her agency?  Maybe she needed to take a call from her stockbroker.

I’m sorry Ms. Warren feels inconvenienced, but perhaps she might want to take a civics course to understand the separation of powers and checks and balances in the federal system.  Congress gets to hold hearings on operations in the executive branch, and they’re not required to put a time limit on their inquiries, especially a one-hour limit that barely gets by the opening remarks in most committee hearings.  If Warren doesn’t like being held accountable to the legislature and to the people, well … she’s in the right administration, apparently.