House Democrats demanded documents Thursday about a multibillion-dollar overseas contracting loophole to track down how _ and why _ the Bush administration slipped it into plans to protect taxpayer money.

The controversial loophole has irked Democrats and Republicans alike. But it has the support of a trade association that lobbies on behalf of giant global government contractors, including Blackwater USA, KBR Inc., Boeing Co., CACI International Inc. and Lockheed Martin.

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Former White House adviser Lewis “Scooter” Libby, convicted last year for lying to a grand jury and federal agents probing the leak of a CIA agent’s identity, was disbarred from practicing law in the nation’s capital on Thursday.

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They and other political appointees have spent the latter part of President Bush's two terms laboring behind the scenes to shrink the federal role in road-building and public transportation. They have also sought to turn highways into commodities that can be sold or leased to private firms and used by motorists for a price. In Duvall and Gribbin's view, unleashing the private sector and introducing market forces could lead to innovation and more choices for the public, much as the breakup of AT&T transformed telecommunications.

But their ideas and actions have alarmed transit advocates, the trucking industry, states struggling to build rail projects and members of Congress from both parties.

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Today, the Justice Department seems at the base of some dark crevasse, and when beams of light flow into it, what we see always causes a shudder. Far from being the gatekeeper of the nation’s legality and the custodian of its ethics, the Justice Department has emerged as the single most corrupt institution on the Washington landscape. The fact that Bush’s first attorney general will soon appear before Congress to explain how he secured a fantastically profitable no-bid contract from a particularly suspect and highly political U.S. attorney can serve as a summary for the entire sordid mess in which the department finds itself. And yet John Ashcroft looks like a moral paragon compared with what followed.

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