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House committee hoping to cure Gonzales of amnesia |
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By Josh Marshall
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Posted: 05/02/07 07:14 PM [ET] |
As some of you know, “Gonzales: The Amnesias, Part II” is coming up next week. The attorney general is scheduled to come up to the Hill to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on the U.S. attorney purge scandal. In addition to a replay of all the ground that was covered in last month’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gonzales will face numerous new lines of questioning. Like: Why did he author that secret memo authorizing his two deputies — Monica Goodling and Kyle Sampson — to hire and fire political appointees at the Department of Justice, thus giving the White House direct control over numerous personnel decisions at the DoJ and cutting senior appointees in the department out of the process entirely?
Given all that’s happened in this scandal, and how many false or at best highly misleading statements Gonzales has made, it’s natural to ask: Why does this guy still have a job? It’s almost unprecedented for a major Cabinet official to continue in place even after he’s clearly lost confidence of most members of the president’s own party on Capitol Hill. So what is it going to take for President Bush to finally “lose confidence” in Gonzales’s leadership of the Justice Department?
Many people point to Gonzales’s close association with the president, which goes back to 1994. Since that year Gonzales has served as Bush’s counsel as governor, Texas secretary of state, as a Bush appointee on the state Supreme Court, as Bush’s White House counsel and now as his attorney general.
But Gonzales’s improbable longevity, his ability to defy political gravity, isn’t a matter of his close bond with the president or the loyalty the two men have toward each other. The simple fact is that it’s not that President Bush won’t fire Alberto Gonzales; it’s that he can’t fire Alberto Gonzales.
Having an AG who let the White House exercise such direct control over the Justice Department was a luxury until this January. But now it’s an absolute necessity.
Just consider what would follow after Gonzales’s departure. Even when President Bush was riding high in January 2005, Gonzales’s appointment raised real questions about whether someone so close to the president should serve as attorney general. Now, with all the rank politicization and potentially criminal behavior that has emerged from the attorney purge scandal, there’s simply no way the Senate — now in Democratic hands — will confirm another close associate of the president’s, someone else who the president can be confident will have his back under all circumstances. Given the statements of the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee last month, it’s not clear that the president could get even a majority of Republicans for such a person, let alone a majority of the whole Senate.
No, President Bush would have to nominate someone who’s actually qualified for the job — which is to say, a respected legal professional who can be expected to place his responsibility to enforce the law above political loyalty to the White House. And that’s something that the White House just can’t tolerate under present circumstances.
The Senate Judiciary Committee might well secure a promise from a new attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the U.S. attorneys’ purge and the White House’s role in the process. But it’s not just that particular scandal. There are numerous other scandals festering, just waiting to be looked at. It’s one thing for House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) to be poking around with subpoenas. After all, he can be stonewalled and painted as a partisan. It’s quite another for an untethered and uncontrolled Department of Justice to be opening up criminal investigations into various administration wrongdoings.
That’s something the White House just can’t allow. And that’s why Alberto Gonzales still has a job. As much of an embarrassment to himself and the administration as he becomes, as much of a political liability as he becomes, he’s better for the administration than whoever would come next. If the White House had ditched Gonzales at the very beginning of the attorney purge scandal, the president might still have been able to get a reliable loyalist into the position. But after three months of investigation and scandal, in which the necessity of the DoJ independence from the White House has been front and center, there’s just no way that’s going to happen.
None of this is about Alberto Gonzales any more. So it really doesn’t matter what new revelations emerge. It’s about protecting the White House. And, ironically, at present, Alberto Gonzales is the best man for the job.
Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com.
His column appears in The Hill each week.
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