UPDATED: MAY 30, 2007

“THE ALBERTO GONZALES STORY, PART 2”

As I noted last week, almost two years ago, on July 1, 2004, I published a column in this space on Alberto Gonzales entitled “Counsel to the President.”  Well, since that time the young man has risen even higher in the Georgite hierarchy.  He is getting lots of publicity these days.  As I noted, the publishing industry’s view of publicity is that there is no such thing as “bad publicity,” only “publicity.”   Since he is just so much in the news, I thought that the Gonzales subject is one worth revisiting at this time.  Please note that this “Part 2” is being written on May 21, 2007, for scheduled publication on May 30.  As I noted last week as well, I am convinced that Gonzales will still be in office on that day and indeed for a considerable time thereafter, for reasons that I detail below.  If I am wrong about that, then all I can say is that everyone makes mistakes. 

Last week I dealt with actions that Gonzales took when he was simply White House Counsel, that concerned the Constitution and how Bush could go about violating it willy-nilly, as it were.  I did not discuss the “Comey-Ashcroft-on-intensive-care story,” (but I will below).  I presented Gonzales’ recommendations to Bush on violating the Constitution to remind all of us that what he was doing back then was rather worse even than firing US Attorneys for party political reasons.  Indeed, Gonzales was and still is a major cog in the Georgite wheel pushing forward the steamroller that is attempting to flatten US Constitutional Democracy into the tarmac.

On the Ashcroft visit, in the Constitutional context Gonzales’ trying to get a fellow reactionary (although apparently not a fascist) to sign off on a secret program that everyone knew was illegal, when the man was possibly at death’s door, has special significance.  That significance is about what the Gonzales/Card visit was about, not that they made it.  Gonzales was recommending to Bush that he violate a specific law on domestic wiretapping and other electronic surveillance. 

In so doing he was recommending to Bush not only that he, Bush, should break the law, but also that he should not do his duty to “Protect and Defend” the Constitution, and go ahead and break the law.  That Gonzales was the messenger himself in this case compounds the matter.  That hospital room scene, with Comey having rushed over sirens blaring, to try to intercept Gonzales and Card, reads like it was a scene out of a Tom Clancy movie, like Patriot Games.  Harrison Ford would play Tom Clancy’s all-American hero, Jack Ryan, standing for truth, justice and the American way against some Gonzales/Card character or two.

The law that Bush would have been continuing to violate in that case had of course been passed by the Congress under its powers and responsibility, under that same Constitution. Let’s forget about the ethics and morality of this Bush Administration (there are indications that Bush himself ordered Gonzales and Card to Ashcroft’s bedside) which lectures all of the rest of us on ethics and morality and runs election campaigns on the two.  More important is that what Gonzales did in this instance was just another example of how he regards the Constitution and Constitutional Democracy.  For him, it is quite obvious that, like his boss, he thinks of the Constitution as nothing but a “scrap of paper.” 

There are several major issues here.  Going back to last week’s material again, one is that, if Bush, on Gonzales’ advice, authorized the breaking of the Geneva Conventions in regard of torture policy (discussed last week), since they are part of the Constitution, that is an impeachable offense.  The other, even more important in my view, is that what is going on here is the substitution of the Rule of Man for the Rule of Law.  This is a very serious threat to every US citizen, and other persons for that matter residing in the United States, as well as to US captives abroad.  We now have as the highest legal officer in the land one who thinks that the Constitution is meaningless, and indeed so is the concept of the Rule of Law.  So when Bush, and Cheney, want to go with the un-Constitutional hypothesis of a “Unitary Executive,” when they want to break the law because it suits them and their policies and political purposes to do so, they have the nation’s top lawyer saying, “yeah, go to it, man.”  This is truly scary.  And this is the most significant fact about what is going on now with the US Attorneys firings and etc.

Under this doctrine, for example, as we have discussed numerous times in this space, the President, on his own authority, can label you or re-label you as some category of person who exists outside of the protections of the US Constitution.  Is it presently in the law, as passed by Congress?  Oh yes, it is.  But those laws were passed at the behest of this President, by his lock-step pre-2007 Congressional majorities.  Whether or not the protections of individual rights and liberties being violated here are to be found in the body of the Constitution, or in treaties that became part of it, Bush/Gonzales say that they can do whatever the President determines to do under something called “inherent powers.” 

Such powers just happen to be nowhere found in the Constitution under any “plain reading” of the text which reactionaries like to trumpet about, except on those occasions when it is inconvenient for them.  And so in this case, this application of so-called “inherent authority” happens to be unconstitutional under the Fourth (search and seizure), Fifth (due process), Sixth (jury trial in criminal cases), and 14^th (equal protection of the law) amendments.  But Bush and his top legal officer go about their business as they fit, Constitution or no.  Under it the President has leave to define those powers in any manner he sees fit.  To come up with such a concept is to endorse explicitly the substitution of the Rule of Man for the Rule of Law.  In so doing, the process also explicitly endorses the eventual end to American Constitutional Democracy, which rests on the bedrock of the Rule of Law, as we have known it.

This, in my view, is the most important single issue facing the country in the “Gonzales Scandal.”  The Georgites have rewritten the Constitution on their own authority.  “We’ll tell you what rights you have and what rights you don’t have, and once we tell you that you don’t have any, we can do whatever we want to with you, whether it’s torture by another name or indefinite imprisonment without charges and without recourse.”  It happens that an Executive undertaking to act in just this manner was a major factor in a Revolution that began around 1776.  But that is neither here not there.  Going after the Constitution is the issue.  Having an Attorney General who encourages, who facilitates the President is doing this is the issue.  And the plan to make the Justice Department into a “Justice” Department, whose primary task becomes not upholding Federal statute but doing everything it can under the ruse of enforcing the law to further the political and policy aims of the Georgites and the Republican Party is the issue.

Now we come to the question, how long will Gonzales remain in office?  In my view, he will remain there for as long as Bush can hold out against the political pressure coming even form his own party, and Bush has proven, on the Iraq war for example, that he is pretty good at doing that.  Gonzales is precisely the Attorney General that Bush wants in that office, and he would have trouble finding another like him who could get confirmed by a Democratic Congress.  It’s Bush, not Gonzales, who is the primary perp. here. From now until the end of his term, Bush will run “Justice” the way he wants to.  Gonzales is doing exactly what he was hired to do in carrying out the BushCheneyRove political, economic, and social agenda, so why change?

It happens that there are other possible reasons why Gonzales might say on.  The main one is that he knows more of the skeletons in the Bush closet and more about their details than anyone.  You think Tenet’s book was bad for the Georgites?  You can just imagine what a Gonzales book would reveal.  The old saying “there is no honor among thieves” certainly applies to this one.  And if Tenet got $4,000,000 for his book, you can imagine how much Gonzales would get for his.

If I am wrong, and Bush would sacrifice, Gonzales, he might well wait until the end of the year and then make a recess appointment.  I hear that John Bolton is still looking for a permanent job. That could happen if at the time the Republicans are getting really desperate about their electoral chances.  Some of those desperate Republicans might somehow be able to bring significant pressure to bear on Bush to give them something of a break, assuming the CheneyBush Permanent War in the Middle East is still underway.  That would assume that Rove has little electoral-power-backed-by-really-nasty-personal-stuff left on those Republicans who are tempted to speak out.  It would also assume that CheneyBush will have been able to find a suitable a very-well-lined-with-dough sinecure for the poor Consigliore, and extract from him a somehow enforceable promise that he would not do that book.  Stay tuned.

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