After meeting with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales last week, Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.), the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, told Reuters, “One day there will be a new attorney general, maybe sooner rather than later.”
It seems to be an increasingly common perspective. Gonzales’ decisions and conduct have managed to do the impossible — make John Ashcroft’s tenure at the Justice Department look good by comparison. Yesterday, the New York Times took the unexpected step of calling for Gonzales’ resignation.
During the hearing on his nomination as attorney general, Alberto Gonzales said he understood the difference between the job he held — President Bush’s in-house lawyer — and the job he wanted, which was to represent all Americans as their chief law enforcement officer and a key defender of the Constitution. Two years later, it is obvious Mr. Gonzales does not have a clue about the difference.
He has never stopped being consigliere to Mr. Bush’s imperial presidency. If anyone, outside Mr. Bush’s rapidly shrinking circle of enablers, still had doubts about that, the events of last week should have erased them.
First, there was Mr. Gonzales’s lame op-ed article in USA Today trying to defend the obviously politically motivated firing of eight United States attorneys, which he dismissed as an “overblown personnel matter.” Then his inspector general exposed the way the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been abusing yet another unnecessary new power that Mr. Gonzales helped wring out of the Republican-dominated Congress in the name of fighting terrorism.
And those are just the newer problems, adding to the list that includes warrantless eavesdropping, signing statements, ignoring the Geneva Conventions, and undermining voting rights. As the NYT put it, “More than anyone in the administration, except perhaps Vice President Dick Cheney, Mr. Gonzales symbolizes Mr. Bush’s disdain for the separation of powers, civil liberties and the rule of law.”
As it happens, the Times is not alone in wanting to see Gonzales give up his post.
Yesterday, two leading Democratic senators, Joseph Biden (Del.) and Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), said the same thing. Schumer said Gonzales has “been even more political than his predecessor, Attorney General Ashcroft,” and that Gonzales “either doesn’t accept or doesn’t understand that he is no longer just the president’s lawyer, but has a higher obligation to the rule of law and the Constitution, even when the president should not want it to be so.”
Gonzales isn’t exactly popular among Republicans, either. The WaPo reported over the weekend, “[S]everal Washington lawyers and GOP strategists with close ties to the White House said last week that lawmakers and conservative lawyers are nervous that Gonzales may not be up to the job.” The Post quoted one GOP adviser to the White House, “This attorney general doesn’t have anybody’s confidence. It’s the worst of Bush — it’s intense loyalty for all the wrong reasons.”
Joe Conason noted that even Bush loyalists in Senate are publicly wavering.
Listen to Sen. John Ensign, a Nevada Republican whose voice is rarely (if ever) raised in protest against the Bush administration. He was an enthusiastic supporter of Gonzales when the White House promoted him to head the Justice Department after the president’s reelection.
But Ensign is now furious because Daniel G. Bogden, whose appointment he had advocated as U.S. attorney five years ago, was among those dumped by Gonzales, over his objections. Told last December that Bogden was being fired for “performance reasons,” Ensign listened incredulously on Tuesday as a Gonzales aide admitted that there were no problems with Bogden’s performance of his duties. The next day Ensign told the Las Vegas Review-Journal (via TPM Muckraker):
“What the Justice Department testified yesterday is inconsistent with what they told me,” said Ensign. “I can’t even tell you how upset I am at the Justice Department.” Did he believe he had been misled? “I was not told the same thing [in December] that I was at the hearing, let me put it that way.” He knew that he had been disrespected — along with fundamental concepts of American government.
It’s possible, if not likely, that these series of events will be enough to force Gonzales’ ouster. That’s especially true if the White House starts to look for a fall-guy to take the blame for these newer scandals.
That said, Josh Marshall raises an important point: as awful as Gonzales is as Attorney General, the systemic problems at the White House go well beyond one incompetent cabinet secretary.
With the rapid pace of events, I suspect it’s only a matter of time before the pressure starts to build for Alberto Gonzales’s resignation. But this isn’t about Alberto Gonzales. This isn’t a guy with his own political strategy, his own list of political chits to arrange or grand strategies to advance. He’s George W. Bush’s consigliere. He gets done what the president wants done. It is a relationship almost Newtonian in its directness.
This was the main question senators had when Gonzales was nominated to be Attorney General — whether he understood the difference between being the White House Counsel, the president’s legal advocate and advisor, and the Attorney General, the chief law enforcement officer of the United States.
Clearly, it’s not a distinction he recognizes. But this also tells us that this isn’t something Gonzales thought up or did on his own. As two “senior Justice [Department] officials” told Michael Isikoff, the list of eight US Attorneys to be fired was developed “with input from the White House.”
That’s the story.
Quite right. There’s no doubt that Gonzales should be held accountable for his role in these scandals, but let’s not forget that the buck doesn’t stop with him.