Krauthammer is right about Gonzales for all the wrong reasons

March 23, 2007

Against my better judgment, I started reading Charles Krauthammer’s column today and was pleasantly surprised by the first five words: “Alberto Gonzales has to go.”

I should have stopped reading. The column went downhill from there.

Krauthammer insists Gonzales’ mistake isn’t obstruction of justice and/or perjury, but merely political. “Gonzales has allowed a scandal to be created where there was none.” And for that, Krauthammer argues, “Gonzales must resign.”

[W]hy did Gonzales have to claim that the firings were done with no coordination with the White House? That’s absurd. Why shouldn’t there be White House involvement? That is nothing to be defensive about. Does anyone imagine that Janet Reno fired all 93 U.S. attorneys in March 1993, giving them all of 10 days to clear out, without White House involvement?

The Bush administration fired eight. Democrats are charging that this was done for reasons of politics and that politics have no place in the legal system. This is laughable. U.S. attorneys are appointed by the president — and, by tradition, are recommended by home state politicians of the same party, not by a group of judges or a committee of the American Bar Association. Which makes their appointment entirely political.

One can’t help but get the impression that well-informed conservatives, such as Krauthammer, know full well that the Clinton comparison is ridiculous, but repeat it anyway for the express purpose of annoying people. It’s kind of like references to the “Democrat Party” — conservatives use poor grammar and debunked canards to test Americans’ tolerance for stupidity in the public discourse.

Then Krauthammer gets into the meat of his argument.

Okay, say the accusers, but once you’ve made the appointments, they should be left to pursue justice on their own. It’s nice to see that Sen. Charles Schumer, who is using this phony scandal to raise funds for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, has suddenly adopted a Platonic view of justice. But the fact is that there are thousands of laws on the books and only finite resources for any prosecutor to deploy, which means that one must have priorities about which laws to emphasize and which crimes to pursue.

Those decisions are essentially political. And they are decided by elections in which both parties spell out very clearly their law enforcement priorities. Are you going to allocate prosecutorial resources more to drug dealing or tax cheating? To street crime or corporate malfeasance? To illegal immigration or illegal pollution? If you’re a Democrat today, you call the choice “political” to confer a sense of illegitimacy. If you’re a neutral observer, you call the choice a set of law enforcement priorities reflecting the policy preferences of the winner of the last presidential election.

For example, both voter intimidation and voter fraud are illegal. The Democrats have a particular interest in the former because they see it diminishing their turnout, while Republicans are particularly interested in the latter because they see it as inflating the Democratic tally. The Bush administration apparently was dismayed that some of these fired attorneys were not vigorous enough in pursuing voter fraud.

I had to read that a couple of times to fully unwrap just what Krauthammer was getting at, particularly on that last point.

First, the argument about fraud is itself a fraud. Second, and more importantly, Christopher Orr noted that Krauthammer appears to believe it is “perfectly acceptable for a White House to fire attorneys because they are not following policy priorities that are explicitly intended to aid its own party at the polls. This is a truly extraordinary assertion: That the party in power is entitled to use law enforcement officers to punish the party out of power. Doubtless Krauthammer will defend this moral principle with equal vigor when a Democrat is in the White House.

Krauthammer concludes:

There is only one impermissible reason for presidential intervention: to sabotage an active investigation. That is obstruction of justice.

I think that’s irresponsibly narrow — there are plenty of other impermissible reasons for presidential intervention — but if even if we play by Krauthammer’s rules, how does he explain the email describing Carol Lam as “the real problem” the day she starts to build on her corruption investigation in the Cunningham scandal?

I keep thinking, one of these days the president’s allies will come up with a coherent defense for all of this. We’re clearly not there yet.

I give you credit for getting thru the whole thing. Remember the Matthew Yglesias rule: “Doing the reverse of what Krauthammer recommends will get you 87 percent or so of the way to perfection.” I guess the application isn’t flawless (does this mean Gonzales should stay?) but it’s always good keeping in mind.

  • i think cb is right about these idiots using the “clinton excuse” just to annoy us. and these same morons fail to see the distinction between prioritizing where prosecutors concentrate their efforts, and directly interfering with an investigation or demanding an investigation where the facts don’t warrant it, and this is what the bush white house has done.

  • “There is only one impermissible reason for presidential intervention: to sabotage an active investigation”?

    So I guess prosecuting Democrats on bogus grounds would be permissible? Or how about if they replaced prosecutors who weren’t “Loyal Bushies” to punish them for past investigations of Republicans, and/or to prevent future investigations of Republicans? I guess that would be OK, because it wouldn’t be “sabotaging an active investigation”?

    Krauthammer is a royal hack. He wants Gonzales out to make the scandal go away, so I say let Alberto spin on the spit as long as possible.

  • Krauthammer’s argument: Certain USAs – McKay and Iglesias – were not macho enough on voter fraud. This was an administration priority and therefore they were fired.

    Reality: McKay and Iglesias did investigate voter fraud but didn’t bring prosecutions when there was insufficient evidence. Ergo, McKay and Iglesias were fired for not bringing spurious prosecutions.

    Question to Krauthammer: are you ignorant of the facts or defending a fascist?

  • Gee, I wonder if Clinton and Reno decided to fire a handful of prosecutors halfway through his second term on the basis of whether or not they were “loyal Clintonites”, would we have seen a different column from Krauthammer? Or if Clinton fired prosecturos for failing to fallow through on baseless voter fraud claims against local GOP outfits prior to quarterly elections? Of if Reno was shown to have lied in front of Congress trying to explain the firings?

    I trduged through his column today as well, and when I got to the line about the “93 prosecutors” i knew the jig was up. The corpse of intellectual honesty rots in Krauthammer’s closet.

  • I noticed Krauthammer ignored the one very important “reason” the attorneys were fired. Investigations of political corruption. He says U.S. Attorneys should follow the policies the President outlines in his election campaign so the voters know what they are voting for.

    Did I miss it? Did Boy George II actually say in his campaign he wanted to bring four times as many investigations of Democrats as Republicans to the Grand Juries for Political Corruption?

    How is that NOT politizing the Justice Department?

  • It’s scary that Krauthammer seems to really believe in his argument, and that many others who read him will think they are getting facts, and will be nodding along.

    He is right about one other thing: the power to remove a US Attorney is the president’s, not the Attorney General’s, not the WH counsel’s, not Karl Rove’s. The ongoing insistence that Bush doesn’t remember, or wasn’t involved is not a great defense to this whole mess – it’s ultimately his decision to make, so he should have been involved. If it’s his agenda and his priorities, he should have had a significant interest in the firing and appointing of these prosecutors. So, did he, or didn’t he?

    He has it completely wrong on prosecutorial independence, too. The Justice Department was never meant to be the political arm of the executive branch – we leave that kind of thing to the third-world countries Bush gets so breathless about bringing democracy to. A president of one party may appoint a USA of that same party, but in many cases that USA is going to be working in a politically different district or state. That USA has to serve the needs of the people of that district or state – and for that reason, he or she functions better when serving the rule of law, and not the Republican or Democratic masters that rule his district, his state or his country. They may serve at the pleasure of the president, but they serve the people, something that seems to have been lost in the shuffle.

    I find it offensive that Krauthammer seems to assume that voter fraud is the sole province of Democrats, failing to acknowledge that Republicans have used suspect and illegal tactics to purge voter rolls, failed to address voting machine problems and generally been up to their elbows in voter fraud over the course of several election cycles.

    Gonzlaes does have to go, but not because he failed to contain a non-scandal. He has to go because actions taken and policies institutionalized at his direction or under his watch have undermined one of the most precious elements of the democracy. If anyone thinks the courts are over-burdened now, wait until the avalanche of appeals descends on the system, all of which are going to claim prosecutorial bias. We will be very lucky if the entire system does not seize up as a result.

  • They repeat the false comparison, not to annoy, but in the furtherance of keeping the electorate dumb. Compare the three things FOX viewers are highly likely to believe to be true, but are false (Iraq was involved in 9/11, Sadam had stockpiles of WMDs, and the world supported our Iraq venture) and how those beliefs tie in to their votes(FOX viewers are more Republican than any other demographic, including Evangelicals). It is clear that the way they perpetuate votes for the GOP through the ignorance of the voters.

  • anne @#9 makes a very good point about a us attorney having to work in a state dominated by the opposing party. here in vermont, we have no death penalty, nor do we have any interest in a death penalty. our state’s us attorney respected our wishes in a particular murder trial, but then attorney general ashcroft forced him to bring the charges under the federal death penalty statute. to his credit, our us attorney, after fighting this “interference” by ashcroft through the system and the courts, did a superb job bringing the case to trial, even tho he was uncomfortable with what he was ordered to do. i think this is a good example of what anne was talking about.

  • It must have been something like this during the Middle Ages when apparently reasonable, clever people argued that the world was flat. It’s hard to understand why they aren’t embarrassed by acting so stupidly, but their failure to convert America into a fascist state must trouble them more. What’s worse is that they came so close to achieving that goal that it ensures they’ll be back—possibly with a “dear leader” who is less stupid than Bush. Perhaps radical-right extremists will find someone who doesn’t screw up everything they’re involved with.
    Maybe we were just lucky this time.

  • Krauthammer is just promoting the propaganda. If facts, logic and intellectual honesty must be sacrificed to further the republican cause, so be it.

  • In his defence of Bush and his prerogatives (he can hire and fire them at will) Krauthammer seems to skate lightly over one aspect of the whole thing: ordinarily, Bush would not have had the priviledge of *hiring* them, only of *nominating* them, for Senate’s consideration. And if the Senate didn’t please, then it was up to judges to coonfirm or not.

    The removal of Senate’s and local bar’s oversight over the process (via that — now rescinded — provision of the Patriot Act) is what makes the whole thing even more outrageous. There are two “prongs” to this particular “plug”: people who had been removed (whether for good reasons or not) and people who replaced them, under radar.

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