[NYTr] Gonzo Goes, But Investigation Must Continue

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by rick kissell

The Nation - Aug 27, 2007


Gonzales Goes But Investigation Must Continue

by John Nichols

Facing the prospect of increasingly aggressive congressional inquiries 
into his politicization of the Department of Justice, as well as an 
energetic House push for his impeachment, Attorney General Alberto 
Gonzales has announced that he will resign effective September 17.

Gonzales, the former White House counsel who made clear during his 
two-and-a-half-year tenure as the nation's top cop that he served 
President Bush rather than the Constitution, is announcing his exit 
strategy just days before the Congress returns from a summer break 
during which senators and representatives had gotten an earful about
the need to get rid of Gonzales.

A proposal by Washington Democrat Jay Inslee, a respected former 
prosecutor, to have the House Judiciary Committee investigate whether 
Gonzales should be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors,
attracted 27 cosponsors during the current recess and would have drawn
many more with the return of the House in early September.

The Attorney General was ripe for impeachment because of a rapidly 
broadening recognition that he had displayed a blatant disregard for
the law since his arrival in Washington in 2001 at the side of his
longtime friend and political benefactor George Bush.

Gonzales, whose signature line was a declaration that he served "at the 
pleasure of the president," made it his business as White House counsel 
and attorney general to do just that.

As counsel from 2001 to 2005, Gonzales blocked requests from the
General Accounting Office for information about Enron officials meeting
with Vice President Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force. He refused
requests from congressional committees for information that the House
and Senate had a right --- and a need. He made the legal case for
torture, despite the fact that the Constitution bars cruel and unusual
punishment. He outlined schemes for subverting the judicial system and
its rules by making terror suspects eligible for military tribunals. He
helped convince Bush to refuse to afford prisoners held at Guantanamo
the basic protections afforded prisoner-of-war under treaties the
United States had accepted as the law of the land.

As the nation's 80th Attorney General --- a position he took in 
February, 2005, after the Senate vote 60-36 to confirm his nomination 
--- Gonzales extended his representation of Bush into should be an 
independent federal agency. He defended the president's authorization
of an illegal warrantless wiretapping program. He accepted the 
"extraordinary rendition" of suspects from U.S. custody to that of 
torture regimes. And he turned the Department of Justice into an 
extension of Karl Rove's White House political shop.

Revelations about the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys who were seen by 
the administration as insufficiently political in their investigations 
and prosecutions opened up an investigation that has begun to confirm a 
broad scheme to politicize the Justice Department's work in the area of 
voting rights --- a scheme apparently designed by Rove to suppress 
turnout by minorities and others who might vote Democratic.

The investigation into those machinations has hit the administration 
hard --- so hard that the president is now jettisoning his oldest and 
closest aides in order to prevent the inquiry from evolving into a 
serious examination of his own lawlessness.

Today's exit announcement by Gonzales comes just days after Rove 
signaled his plan to go.

The important thing now is to make sure that the administration does
not succeed in using high-profile departures to shut down --- or, at
the very least, to diminish the seriousness and the extent of --- those 
inquiries.

When Rove announced the he was leaving, Senate Judiciary Committee
chair Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, made it clear that the political aide
remained a target of broad inquiries by the judiciary committees of the
House and Senate.

"Mr. Rove acted as if he was above the law. That is wrong, Leahy said
at the time. "Now that he is leaving the White House while under
subpoena, I continue to ask what Mr. Rove and others at the White House
are so desperate to hide. Mr. Rove's apparent attempts to manipulate
elections and push out prosecutors citing bogus claims of voter fraud
shows corruption of federal law enforcement for partisan political
purposes, and the Senate Judiciary Committee will continue its
investigation into this serious issue."

Referencing the growing sense that the inquiry into wrongdoing in and 
around the Justice Department could yet be the undoing of the 
Bush-Cheney administration, Leahy added, "The list of senior White
House and Justice Department officials who have resigned during the
course of these congressional investigations continues to grow, and
today, Mr. Rove added his name to that list. There is a cloud over this
White House, and a gathering storm. A similar cloud envelopes Mr. Rove,
even as he leaves the White House."

The "list" referenced by Leahy gets longer with the news that Gonzales 
is going.

But the essential question with regard to Gonzales remains the same as 
the question that Leahy laid down when Rove said he would go: What are 
these people so desperate to hide?

The answer is that, just as Gonzales and Rove served Bush rather than 
the Constitution, they now seek with their resignations to protect Bush 
--- and Vice President Cheney --- from investigations that are
necessary to any serious effort to restore the primacy of the founding
document in the affairs of the nation.

Only a continued inquiry into the lawlessness of the soon-to-be-former 
Attorney General will achieve what is the essential purpose of this 
Congress: the restoring of the rule of law to a country deeply damaged 
by petty little men who chose personal loyalties and political 
expediency over their duty to the Republic.


[John Nichols' new book is "The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders'
Cure for Royalism." Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson hails it as a "nervy, 
acerbic, passionately argued history-cum-polemic [that] combines a rich 
examination of the parliamentary roots and past use of the 'heroic 
medicine' that is impeachment with a call for Democratic leaders to 
'reclaim and reuse the most vital tool handed to us by the founders for 
the defense of our most basic liberties.'" ]