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Upside of the attorney scandal |
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By Byron York
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Posted: 03/22/07 06:22 PM [ET] |
Have you noticed something missing from the political fight over the Bush administration’s firings of eight U.S. attorneys?
The White House is taking a hard line against congressional Democrats, and most conservative commentators support the president’s contention that his inside-the-White House policy consultations with advisers are privileged.
The president is also taking a hard line in defense of his friend, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. But you’re not seeing much support from conservatives on that score.
What accounts for the difference? Two words: Supreme Court.
Start at the beginning. In general, Washington conservatives have never been too fond of Gonzales.
When he came here, like many political appointees, his most compelling qualification for office was his history with the president.
He was, and is, extremely loyal to George W. Bush, and George W. Bush was, and is, extremely loyal to him.
But conservatives in Washington don’t share that history, and they were never terribly impressed with Gonzales.
In blunt terms, they viewed him as a squish — a man without the strong, fixed views on the law that the conservative legal establishment values.
That was fine when Gonzales was White House counsel — he was, after all, the president’s lawyer. That was even OK when Bush chose Gonzales to be attorney general.
But the thing that always worried — terrified — conservatives about Gonzales was the possibility that Bush would nominate him to the Supreme Court.
Why? On two issues that have always been contentious on the Court, Gonzales has strongly disagreed with conservative positions.
On affirmative action, he intervened to water down the administration’s position in the big University of Michigan preferences case in 2003.
On abortion, social conservatives have disliked him since the time, as a justice on the Texas Supreme Court, he voted against conservatives on a case involving parental notification for teenage girls seeking an abortion.
But those are just two issues. As for the rest of Gonzales’s judicial philosophy, the problem is not so much that conservatives disagree with it as they don’t know what it is.
And that reminded them of another nominee chosen by another President Bush.
In 2003, my National Review colleague Ramesh Ponnuru noted that conservatives on the Hill had a new saying: “Gonzales is Spanish for Souter.”
By that, conservatives meant that a Gonzales nomination might be as much of a failure as George H.W. Bush’s famously bad choice of David Souter for the Court.
National Review looked at both men and concluded that Gonzales was no better than Souter, and perhaps worse. “When Souter was nominated, we didn’t know anything about his views,” the magazine wrote. “We do know something about Gonzales’s views, and what we know is not encouraging.”
That brings us to the U.S. attorneys matter.
Let’s say you’re a conservative lawmaker, or a conservative activist, or a conservative commentator.
The Supreme Court is important to you.
You are happy that President Bush chose John Roberts and Samuel Alito for the Court. They’re your idea of conservative legal superstars: sharp, principled, and dazzlingly knowledgeable about constitutional law.
But you were dismayed — to say the least — when the president tried to put Harriet Miers on the Court.
So now you worry that if he could choose the loyal Miers, he might choose the loyal Gonzales, should another vacancy arise.
But now comes the controversy over U.S. attorneys.
On the substance of it — the question of whether the Bush administration tried to interfere with ongoing criminal investigations — the Democratic accusations against the administration appear to be weak.
On the handling of it — the explanations for the firings given by Gonzales and other top Justice Department officials — the administration is guilty of screwing it up badly.
So look at it this way:
Conservatives don’t have any great desire to see the attorney general resign.
But if it takes the U.S. attorney mess to permanently remove Alberto Gonzales from his place on the president’s Supreme Court list — well, so be it.
The next time you hear that interesting silence from conservatives on the future of the attorney general, you’ll know why.
York is a White House correspondent for National Review. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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