The title of this post is actually a line from Josh Marshall’s blog post on Tony Snow’s press conference this morning. Here’s an update from him. I like the first post better.
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I thought this editorial from The Nation summed up the reasons why what is now being called “Attorneygate” is an important story. It is another example of executive overreach, of President Snarky attempting to consolidate power in the chief executive at the expense of the Constitution.
Here is the editorial in its entirety (please go to The Nation and read the rest of the magazine):
The December 7 Massacre
[from the April 2, 2007 issue]In the earliest months of the Bush Administration, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft began routinely overruling federal prosecutors’ sentencing recommendations, forcing on US Attorneys unprecedented numbers of death sentences. From that moment it should have been clear that this White House views these attorneys not as law-enforcement professionals but as the partisan muscle for its entwined political and policy ambitions.
Now, after the abrupt firing in December of eight US Attorneys, it stands revealed that officials at the highest levels of the Republican Party and the White House have routinely sought to strong-arm prosecutors in the most politically sensitive law-enforcement matters. In Seattle US Attorney John McKay lost his job after rebuffing a thoroughly improper request by Representative Doc Hastings, former chair of the House Ethics Committee (!), to intervene in Washington’s gubernatorial recount. In New Mexico US Attorney David Iglesias lost his job for refusing to speed up investigations of Democrats in time for the fall elections. Karl Rove, it turns out, routinely acted as the GOP’s messenger, conveying to the Justice Department the displeasure of political operatives with individual US Attorneys. And the President himself, according to press reports confirmed by the White House, explicitly sought the removal of US Attorneys deemed insufficiently enthusiastic about pursuing vote-fraud cases against Democrats.
The stakes in the Gonzales Eight scandal are far more profound than the hiring and firing of a few prosecutors. It is by now a shopworn cliché of the Bush Administration to say that the Constitution itself is at stake. But what other assessment is possible? Each of the Gonzales Eight–to a person, competent and admired prosecutors–lost a job because the President, Rove and other GOP bosses sought to warp fundamental American institutions, including elections, criminal investigations and sentencing, for political gain. That is the very essence of corruption.
Do US Attorneys in every Administration serve at the pleasure of the President? Of course. The appointment of federal prosecutors is part of the spoils system as surely as the nomination of federal judges. But as with judges, the rule of law depends on US Attorneys, whatever their political background, acting with independence and professionalism. Most Presidents, even the most partisan and corrupt, have understood that. In any event, these firings had nothing to do with law enforcement or competence.
Outrage over the scandal is bipartisan–and, one hopes, will bring ethical sanctions down on certain GOP Congress members, including Hastings. But it must be noted that it took Democratic subpoenas to expose Gonzales as a liar for saying that politics had nothing to do with the firings. Now the Attorney General has been forced to fold his cards in the long-simmering controversy over Congressional review of interim US Attorney appointments, and his chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, has resigned.
Democrats who have been reluctant to pursue investigations of torture, the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina should take two lessons. First, all are aspects of the same scandal: a White House determined to establish extralegal authority both abroad and at home. Second, hearings and subpoenas not only get out the facts but force the Administration to back down. In this case, at least, Congressional Democrats have begun–but only begun–to find their collective voice as a check on Bush’s executive power-grab.
The case of the Gonzales Eight makes it vividly clear that this Justice Department isn’t only covering up illegality in the Nixon mode. From the President on down, the Administration sees no legal limits to presidential power, whether in a US Attorney’s office in Phoenix or an interrogation room in Guantánamo. In such an environment, with such permission from the Oval Office itself, the Justice Department is the locus, the engine, the pumping heart of scandal. That is why Senator Chuck Schumer was right to call for the resignation of Attorney General Gonzales. But that is also why Gonzales’s resignation, if it happens, will not be enough.
Just another bit of evidence supporting impeachement of the president. (Read my column in The Progressive Populist.)
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Four years after this war began, the fight is difficult, but it can be won. It will be won if we have the courage and resolve to see it through.
Resolve? We’ve had four years of resolve that has resulted in more than 3,200 dead American soldiers — along with thousands who have sustained debilitating injuries — and thousands upon thousands of Iraqis killed in combat and by the chaos that has come to replace Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime.
And yet, after four years of resolve, four years in which we’ve shown too much patience for a deceiptful and incompetent presidential administration, we are being told that more patience is in order, that we must avoid the temptation “to look at the challenges in Iraq and conclude our best option is to pack up and go home.”
That may be satisfying in the short run, but I believe the consequences for American security would be devastating. If American forces were to step back from Baghdad before it is more secure, a contagion of violence could spill out across the entire country. In time, this violence could engulf the region.
I’d like to believe that our presence in Iraq may lead to greater security. But the evidence is just not there. Various reports from the region — from sources unaffiliated with the administration — have indicated that the so-called surge has forced the insurgents underground, but only temporarily.
That has created an illusion of calm, they say, even as the many bombings continue. The Guardian of London, for instance, reports that
Despite the month-long security crackdown in the capital, six people were killed and 30 injured in a car bomb blast in a Shia suburb yesterday. In all, 24 corpses were found in different parts of the city.
None of this should be a surprise. In many ways, it is the American presence that is exacerbating the situation.
H.D.S. Greenway, writing in The Boston Globe last week, made just this point:
When the president and surge proponents talk about restoring law and order to Baghdad, they underestimate the fact that it is the very presence of American soldiers themselves who are sparking the resistance, and thus the chaotic conditions in which criminals can operate, and militias appear to be the population’s only salvation. Americans may try to do their jobs humanely, but the nature of their business is coercive, brutal, and ultimately counterproductive.
So, forgive me for a lack of patience.
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If Alberto Gonzales won’t resign as U.S. attorney general (consider this and this), then President George W. Bush should fire him — and if the president won’t do it, the legislative branch should step in.
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The dissident novelists of the former Eastern Bloc — writers like Milan Kundera and Josef Skvoercky — often took as their theme the manner in which history was distorted by the communist regimes, the way officials who had fallen from favor would be airbrushed from the official narrative.
I wonder what they would make of this:
In December 1989, one month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, President George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev met in Malta and, in the words of a Soviet spokesman, “buried the cold war at the bottom of the Mediterranean.”
The Russian transcript of that momentous summit was published in Moscow in 1993. Fourteen years later American historians are still waiting for their own government to release a transcript.
The reason for this is a 2001 executive order issued by President George W. Bush that gave
sitting presidents the power to delay the release of papers indefinitely, while extending the control of former presidents, vice presidents and their families
and
changed the system from one that automatically released documents 30 days after a current or former president is notified to one that withholds papers until a president specifically permits their release.
The Bush system has given working historians fits and seems more suited to the closed societies of the old Soviet satellite states — which is consistent with the Bush administration’s devotion to secrecy and its attempts to broaden the powers of the chief executive. Thomas S. Blanton, executive director of an independent research institute called the National Security Archive at George Washington University,
said he believes the Bush White House is primarily concerned with reversing what it sees as an erosion of presidential power after Watergate. “It has the added advantage of giving the incumbent a lot more control over history,” he said.
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is reviewing legislation that would overturn the executive order — it could go to the full House next week for a vote. The it would need Senate approval — and a signature for the man looking to limit access, meaning the legislation is likely to fade away along with our democracy.
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Hank Kalet 