Congress should impeach Gonzales
Posted on Wednesday, August 1, 2007
For all its emotional appeal, this
column has always opposed wasting
time and energy on the impeachment of President Bush. That’s not to say one couldn’t draw up a list of impeachable offenses, from taking the nation to war on false premises to countenancing such outrages against the Constitution as warrantless wiretaps, false imprisonment and torture. The votes, however, simply don’t exist. Congressional Republicans remain committed to Bush / Cheney, along with the party’s hard-core base. Dragging the nation through another fruitless, made-for-TV spectacle like the Clinton impeachment would look like cheap revenge. It would threaten to turn a grave constitutional remedy into a commonplace political sideshow. That said, Congress should quit pussyfooting around and impeach Attorney General Alberto Gonzales at once. Halfway measures like a special prosecutor would only produce more of what Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N. Y., characterizes as Gonzales’ strategy of “the half-truth, the partial truth and anything but the truth.” For once, I agree with Newt Gingrich. Appearing on “FOX News Sunday,” he declined to defend Gonzales against accusations of repeatedly lying to Congress.
“I think it’s very damaging,” Gingrich said. “[W ] e badly need an attorney general who is above any question.... Both the president and country are better served if the attorney general is seen as a figure of probity and a figure of integrity and a figure of competence. And sadly, the current attorney general is not seen as any of those things. And I think that it’s a liability for the president. More importantly, it’s a liability for the United States of America.”
Even normally reliable right-wing pundits are disgusted. In his National Review blog, Jonah Goldberg opines that “the only possible defense of Gonzales against charges of villainy is rank incompetence.”
Both men surely grasp that, far from being a liability, Gonzales is doing exactly what Bush wants. From his earliest days in Texas drawing up Cliff’s Notes briefs designed to prevent Bush from straining his beautiful mind worrying about the guilt of death row inmates, Gonzales has always enacted the amiable dunce to his patron’s advantage.
Drawn up into his characteristic posture of petulant teen-ager, the president expects the attorney general of the United States to conduct himself like a celebrity lawyer defending a Hollywood drunk-driving charge. Gonzales appears eager to oblige, even at the cost of personal humiliation.
Last April, Gonzales appeared before a Senate committee probing the firings of nine U. S. attorneys, allegedly for being unwilling to prosecute dubious voting fraud cases. He testified 60 times that he couldn’t remember crucial memos, e-mails or conversations, including the final meeting where he formally signed off on the plan.
The manager of a Wal-Mart sporting goods department would be fired for such ineptitude. So is Gonzales more cunning or dumb ? According to a recent Washington Post story quoting longtime observers, the jury’s still out: “Some regard his verbal difficulties as a strategic ploy on behalf of a president to whom he owes his career; others see a public official overwhelmed by the magnitude of his responsibilities.”
Why not both ? Surrounding oneself with half-competent sycophants is a timeless strategy for avoiding personal responsibility. In the present dispute with the Senate Judiciary Committee over the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping, however, Gonzales appears to have crawled into a very tight corner.
Besides being of great constitutional importance—How limited is the president by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act law making warrantless wiretaps a felony ? Are Fourth Amendment privacy rights null and void?—the situation is fraught with compelling dramatic elements. Gonzales has twice testified that there was no significant dissent within the administration over Bush’s secretly authorizing the National Security Agency to intercept Americans’ phone calls and e-mails without a legal warrant.
In reality, the program sparked a rebellion inside the Justice Department. Both former FBI Director Robert Mueller and Assistant Attorney General James Comey have testified that it came to a head in 2004 when virtually the department’s entire top echelon threatened to resign in protest unless the policy was significantly changed. The exact terms of the dispute aren’t known.
(Naturally, Gonzales testified at his 2005 confirmation hearings that warrantless domestic wiretaps weren’t taking place because they would be illegal. ) Indeed, the dispute became so heated that, reportedly on Dick Cheney’s orders, Gonzales himself was dispatched to the hospital room where a groggy Attorney General John Ashcroft was recovering from cancer surgery to pressure him to overrule Comey. Ashcroft refused. Now Gonzales alibis that the argument concerned “other intelligence activities” that he can’t disclose. Rather than perjuring himself, Gonzales claims that he was merely being prudent. He and his questioners simply meant different things by “Terrorist Surveillance Program,” although he didn’t see fit to say so. What it all comes down to is a fight between honorable conservative principles and the authoritarian Bush cult. Now that it’s finally dawned on some Republicans that Bushism is destroying their party, impeaching Gonzales would afford them a dramatic opportunity to save it. Or not.
—–––––•–––––—Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.
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