We haven’t heard too much from Alberto Gonzales since he resigned in disgrace as Attorney General. He was last seen struggling to find a job in his profession, and delivering a commencement address at a small high school in the Virgin Islands. Seriously.
I was surprised, then, to see Gonzales pop up yesterday in the LAT with an op-ed on “what Latinos want from their president.” The former AG, without a hint of irony, emphasized the importance of the next administration taking “racial equality” seriously.
[Latinos] want a society that recognizes and rewards us based on our hard work and ingenuity, not our skin color…. [A]lthough we know that America strives to be a fair country, the harsh reality is we are not one nation with liberty and justice for all. […]
As we move to the next phase of the presidential campaign, some people may try to discourage discussion about race relations in favor of issues they say are of greater importance…. However, we need leaders who appreciate — and who choose to confront — the crucial elements of racial inequality within these so-called bigger issues. Those are the leaders who are likely to be successful in finding effective solutions to our most important challenges.
Look, all of this is very nice. It’s a compelling sentiment about an issue I feel very strongly about.
But if Alberto Gonzales thinks he can speak with any authority — moral or otherwise — about combating “the crucial elements of racial inequality,” he must assume we have very short memories.
Maybe Gonzales can talk about his comfort level with the Bush administration’s approach to vote caging.
Vote caging is an illegal trick to suppress minority voters (who tend to vote Democrat) by getting them knocked off the voter rolls if they fail to answer registered mail sent to homes they aren’t living at (because they are, say, at college or at war). The Republican National Committee reportedly stopped the practice following a consent decree in a 1986 case. Google the term and you’ll quickly arrive at the Wizard of Oz of caging, Greg Palast, investigative reporter and author of the wickedly funny Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans — Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild. Palast started reporting allegations of Republican vote caging for the BBC’s Newsnight in 2004. He’s been almost alone on the story since then. Palast contends, both in Armed Madhouse and widely through the liberal blogosphere, that vote caging, an illegal voter-suppression scheme, happened in Florida in 2004 this way:
The Bush-Cheney operatives sent hundreds of thousands of letters marked “Do not forward” to voters’ homes. Letters returned (“caged”) were used as evidence to block these voters’ right to cast a ballot on grounds they were registered at phony addresses. Who were the evil fakers? Homeless men, students on vacation and — you got to love this — American soldiers. Oh yeah: most of them are Black voters.
Why weren’t these African-American voters home when the Republican letters arrived? The homeless men were on park benches, the students were on vacation — and the soldiers were overseas.
Or maybe Gonzales can explore what happened to the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during his tenure in the administration.
Karen Stevens, Tovah Calderon and Teresa Kwong had a lot in common. They had good performance ratings as career lawyers in the Justice Department’s civil rights division. And they were minority women transferred out of their jobs [three] years ago — over the objections of their immediate supervisors — by Bradley Schlozman, then the acting assistant attorney general for civil rights.
Schlozman ordered supervisors to tell the women that they had performance problems or that the office was overstaffed. But one lawyer, Conor Dugan, told colleagues that the recent Bush appointee had confided that his real motive was to “make room for some good Americans” in that high-impact office, according to four lawyers who said they heard the account from Dugan.
In another politically tinged conversation recounted by former colleagues, Schlozman asked a supervisor if a career lawyer who had voted for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a onetime political rival of President Bush, could still be trusted.
Or perhaps Gonzales can explain why the Justice Department’s habit of violating employment law got worse after he became Attorney General.
I certainly agree that we do need leaders who “appreciate — and who choose to confront — the crucial elements of racial inequality,” but it would have been nice to have a chief law-enforcement officer who took these issues seriously, too.