Bring It On

After waffling on the sidelines for a week or so regarding the prosecutor purge scandal, President Bush has waded in with both fists. When Congressional Democrats said they would ask Karl Rove, Harriet Miers and other White House officials to testify, Bush responded with defiance, saying any testimony could take place only behind closed doors, not under oath and with no transcript. He practically dared Congress to subpoena them, saying he would fight any such move.

Fine by me. Bush has broken the law and committed outrages against democratic governance so many times that we need a good, bruising Constitutional showdown.

What is causing his sudden go-screw-yourself attitude? Is it simple antipathy towards anything that infringes on his vision of himself as Maximum Leader of the nation? Or is he trying to hide real crimes in his Administration, even more than what we already know?

I suspect the latter. Something must have come up in the morass of documents studied by White House counsel Fred Fielding that raised a very large red flag, something that has to be kept secret at all costs. What could it be? Written instructions to go after prominent Democrats? Explicit orders to drop cases against prominent Republicans?

We will find out.

Resign

Let's face it - Alberto Gonzales was not appointed Attorney General because of his devotion to enforcing federal laws. Rather, he got the job because of his long history of fealty to George W. Bush no matter what. Whenever following the law has come into conflict with following Bush's personal whims, the latter has won out every time. He was able to get away with it as long as Congress was in Republican hands, but now that adults are back in charge on Capitol Hill and oversight is no longer a dirty word, he's in real trouble.

The prosecutor purge, of course, is exhibit A. Conspiring with Karl Rove and other Justice Department and White House higher-ups, Gonzales axed eight U.S. Attorneys who were seen as insufficiently subservient to Maximum Leader Bush and the Republican Party. The reasons are varied, but all stink to high heaven.

One sent GOP Rep. Duke Cunningham to jail for taking bribes from defense contractors and was investigating CIA officials in the same scandal. Another refused to manufacture a phony "voter fraud" case to harass the Democratic winner of a closely contested election. Still another was pressured by a GOP Senator and Representative to indict a prominent local Democrat before the 2006 election. A fourth was fired simply to make room for a Rove crony. And so on and so forth.

The GOP has fallen back on its ABC defense - Always Blame Clinton. Since Bill Clinton replaced all 93 prosecutors at the beginning of his term, they say, Bush was just doing the same thing by ousting eight of them. The excuse is, of course, fake; incoming Presidents have always appointed their own stable of prosecutors. Bush's actions were very different in that he fired prosecutors to further politically-motivated probes or to punish those who took prosecutorial independence seriously.

And if all that wasn't bad enough, the National Journal reported late last week on Gonzales' role in shutting down the investigation into the Bush Administration's wholesale spying on the American people. You may recall that in late 2005, the New York Times revealed that the White House secretly ordered wiretaps and other snooping on American citizens without bothering to get the judicial approval required by the Constitution and statute law. DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility, the department's internal watchdog, started to investigate the revelations only to be blocked when Bush refused to approve security clearances for the probers. It was Gonzales who recommended that the clearances be denied.

The problem was that at the time he made his recommendation, Gonzales was fully aware that he himself was to be a target of the investigation based on his actions as White House counsel. At the very least, shutting down a probe of himself is a pretty serious conflict of interest; at most, it goes all the way up to obstruction of justice, a felony.

Alberto Gonzales should never have become Attorney General. He is a partisan hack, slavishly loyal to his benefactor at the expense of all else. He should resign immediately, and take his fellow toadies with him.