http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/070902/10justice.htmThe resignation of embattled U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was never a question of if but of when. So when Gonzales finally announced last week that he will leave the Justice Department, his departure offered a glimmer of hope that the beleaguered agency would at last have a chance to remake an image sullied by months of scandals.
Gonzales's inability to explain—or even, he said, remember—whether politics played an undue role in the department's hiring, firing, and prosecution decisions turned the former Texas Supreme Court judge and presidential confidant into a symbol of all that was wrong inside the 110,000-person bureaucracy.
But with little more than a year remaining in the Bush administration, the next attorney general will face daunting challenges in trying to rebuild the department. Election-year politics, congressional probes, an unpopular president—these and other barriers mean that even the strongest candidate may have to settle for piecemeal reform.
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"More than any individual policy, the Senate will be looking for a guarantee that the attorney general will serve justice rather than the president," says Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor.
Loyalists. That guarantee could be hard to secure. Many of the possible replacements for Gonzales—Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, former Solicitor General Theodore Olson, and soon-to-be Acting Attorney General Paul Clement—are seen as loyal conservatives. And the White House may be unwilling to nominate someone who would break from some of the core tenets that made Gonzales so divisive: the use of executive power to justify practices like the National Security Agency's warrantless domestic wiretapping and limiting the rights of the detainees at the Guantánamo Bay naval base.
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