NYT editorial: Gonzales is saying he's weathered the storm; "We can only hope he is wrong."

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: Editorial
A Feeble Performance

Published: May 12, 2007
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has reportedly begun telling friends and associates that he has weathered the storm over the firing of nine United States attorneys and that his job is safe despite widespread calls for his resignation. We can only hope he is wrong. Not only is the purge of the attorneys extremely serious, it is part of a long chain of evidence that Mr. Gonzales does not have the ability or the moral compass to do his vitally important job.

Consider Mr. Gonzales’s performance the other day before the House Judiciary Committee, where the chairman, John Conyers Jr., framed the questioning with admirable simplicity: who made up the list of prosecutors to be fired, and why? That should not be a hard question. The nine prosecutors who are now known to have been purged — it was eight until the case of Todd Graves of Missouri came to light this week — are nearly 10 percent of all United States attorneys. It defies belief that an attorney general would allow so many top officials to be fired without being well aware of the reasons.

Yet that was just what Mr. Gonzales claimed. He delegated, he was not informed, he just could not recall. None of it was believable. When asked by Representative Robert Wexler who decided to fire David Iglesias, the United States attorney in New Mexico, Mr. Gonzales flatly stated that President Bush and Vice President Cheney did not. He said he did not know who chose individual prosecutors to be fired, but he was certain that it was not his bosses.

As disturbing as Mr. Gonzales’s convenient memory lapses and apparent prevarications was his unwillingness to engage the moral seriousness of this scandal. He seemed indifferent when asked if it would be a bad thing if United States attorneys — critically important players in the justice system — were pushed out to make room for eager young Republicans. He kept trying to change the subject from the administration’s efforts to politicize the rule of law to the agenda he claims now preoccupies him — fighting terrorism, crime and child predators.

Nothing in this stumbling, evasive, amnesia-filled performance gave any reassurance that the firings were proper. It was a reminder that Mr. Gonzales’s record was deplorable before the prosecutor purge. He was an architect of policies in the war on terror that the Supreme Court has held to be illegal and unconstitutional. He has defended President Bush’s illegal domestic wiretapping operations with a zeal terrifying in the head of an agency that is supposed to uphold the Constitution — not manufacture excuses for the president to trample on it. There is also evidence that he allowed ideologues to pack career positions at the Justice Department with thinly credentialed hires, chosen for their party affiliation....

***

...The White House clearly has reasserted some party discipline since his Senate appearance the other week, when several Republicans called for his resignation. But that does not mean it is in anyone’s interest for him to stay on....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/12/opinion/12sat1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

[The Backlash Cometh]

1. Alberto sounds like a man who came out during the eye of the storm

...and he's looking in the direction from where the winds just blew, and not where they're about to come from.

[Kagemusha]

2. Unless Gooding brings the goods, it's not good out there.

It's obvious from reading this editorial that Gonzales lied to their faces, he knows it, they know it, everyone knows it, and they can't lay a glove on him. There is no fear of Congress re: perjury anymore. None. At all.

If that's the result of this entire affair, the Republic is worse off for it.

[Gman]

4. I hope you're not right

but I'm afraid you may well be.

[Kagemusha]

6. We'll see. The annoying lady hasn't sunk yet.

They haven't quite run out of shoes to drop yet. But they do need at least one that delivers something tangible.

[bobbolink]

3. Article still missing target: rigged '08 election!

That's what this is all about, and it's sliding by everyone...

sigh...

[aquart]

5. Hang him like an anvil around their Republican necks.

Let the smug bastard smirk as they go down.

HE THINKS IT'S OVER! He thinks he's Bill Clinton and he'll go on to be rich and honored. Him and Wolfowitz.

Actually, this may be where it becomes fun. (Just sent a quick email to Schumer. He shouldn't think I've forgotten or given up.)

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. The NYT is effectively calling for Gonzales to be impeached

which would be interesting:

Mr. Gonzales can cling to his office as long as the president supports him and Congress does not impeach him. The White House clearly has reasserted some party discipline since his Senate appearance the other week, when several Republicans called for his resignation. But that does not mean it is in anyone’s interest for him to stay on. The Justice Department is too important to be saddled with a year and a half more of such shoddy leadership.

ie he needs to go, but he won't resign, and the president won't get rid of him, so it's up to Congress to impeach.

[Raksha]

8. Exactly what I was thinking. Gonzo is the weakest link,

the easiest target, so the impeachments should start with him. That would also put the fear of God into Bush and Cheney, and let them know that WE'RE SERIOUS and we do have the power to get rid of them.

[DeepModem Mom]

9. Here's a recent NYT op-ed calling for Gonzales's impeachment --

Op-Ed Contributor
He’s Impeachable, You Know
By FRANK BOWMAN
Published: May 3, 2007
Columbia, Mo.

IF Alberto Gonzales will not resign, Congress should impeach him. Article II of the Constitution grants Congress the power to impeach “the president, the vice president and all civil officers of the United States.” The phrase “civil officers” includes the members of the cabinet (one of whom, Secretary of War William Belknap, was impeached in 1876).

Impeachment is in bad odor in these post-Clinton days. It needn’t be. Though provoked by individual misconduct, the power to impeach is at bottom a tool granted Congress to defend the constitutional order. Mr. Gonzales’s behavior in the United States attorney affair is of a piece with his role as facilitator of this administration’s claims of unreviewable executive power.

A cabinet officer, like a judge or a president, may be impeached only for commission of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” But as the Nixon and Clinton impeachment debates reminded us, that constitutional phrase embraces not only indictable crimes but “conduct ... grossly incompatible with the office held and subversive of that office and of our constitutional system of government.”...

***

A false claim not to remember is just as much a lie as a conscious misrepresentation of a fact one remembers well. Instances of phony forgetfulness seem to abound throughout Mr. Gonzales’s testimony, but his claim to have no memory of the November Justice department meeting at which he authorized the attorney firings left even Republican stalwarts like Jeff Sessions of Alabama gaping in incredulity. The truth is almost surely that Mr. Gonzales’s forgetfulness is feigned — a calculated ploy to block legitimate Congressional inquiry into questionable decisions made by the Department of Justice, White House officials and, quite possibly, the president himself.

Even if perjury were not a felony, lying to Congress has always been understood to be an impeachable offense. As James Iredell, later a Supreme Court justice, said in 1788 during the debate over the impeachment clause, “The president must certainly be punishable for giving false information to the Senate.” The same is true of the president’s appointees.

The president may yet yield and send Mr. Gonzales packing. If not, Democrats may decide that to impeach Alberto Gonzales would be politically unwise. But before dismissing the possibility of impeachment, Congress should recognize that the issue here goes deeper than the misbehavior of one man. The real question is whether Republicans and Democrats are prepared to defend the constitutional authority of Congress against the implicit claim of an administration that it can do what it pleases and, when called to account, send an attorney general of the United States to Capitol Hill to commit amnesia on its behalf.

(Frank Bowman is a law professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/03/opinion/03bowman.html?ex=1179115200&en=26ed3517505b70c3&ei=5070