Attorney General Gonzales (of whom I am not a very big fan) has been the subject of demands for resignation, apparently because nine U.S. Attorneys were recently fired and he and possibly political advisors in the White House were somehow involved in making that happen.
For those of the Loyal Readership who are unfamiliar with the process, there are about 200 U.S. Attorneys; they are in charge of various geographic divisions of the Justice Department. They are the prosecutors for the Federal Government and they also represent the government in civil cases. Professional federal prosecutors are called Assistant U.S. Attorneys and make their careers prosecuting bad guys — drug dealers of mid- to large magnitude, money launderers, organized crime bosses, and corrupt politicians are the most prominent kinds of targets of these prosecutors.
And it’s the anti-corruption activities that give rise to the calls for Gonzales’ resignation. As I understand it, the story goes that Gonzales, or somebody else close to the Oval Office, directed a variety of U.S. Attorneys to investigate political corruption, and directed the focus of that attention to Democrats.
Umm. So what? If they directed that corruption investigations against Republicans cease, that would be something. Trying to protect cronies and allies would be an abuse of power. But investigating other people who are abusing their power is what prosecutors are supposed to do. If the person on the receiving end of this kind of treatment is a member of the opposition party, so what? No one’s supposed to be taking bribes.
What’s more, the U.S. Attorneys are political appointees. As political appointees, they serve at the pleasure of the President. If the President is unsatisfied with their performance, he can dismiss them. And since these are political appointees, the President is properly subject to political pressure, and properly exerts political pressure, in controlling who holds these jobs. These aren’t supposed to be civil service jobs insulated from the rough and tumble of politics. If we were talking about Assistant U.S. Attorneys here, the professional careerists who do the bulk of the work, that would be different. These are the people who direct and control the individual offices, and without a certain amount of discretionary control over these people, the President would be effectively unable to implement his priorities for federal law enforcement. And that is one of the things we elect Presidents to do.
Maybe firing these attorneys was unwise; maybe you or I would have kept them in their positions had you or I been President. But the thing is, you and I are not the President. George W. Bush is. He’s the decider. He gets to make that call and we don’t.
Like I said before, using the discretion inherent in the Presidency to protect political cronies would be an abuse of power. But I haven’t heard any claims that this has happened. The investigations and prosecutions have not been directed exclusively at Democrats, and indeed, at least two prominent Republican legislators — Bob Ney and Duke Cunningham — did get prosecuted for corruption. Another prominent political corruption play was the Tennessee Waltz affair from 2004, which caught up Republicans and Democrats in its net. Certainly there was “Dollar” Bill Jefferson, he of the $90,000 stored in the freezer, wrapped in aluminum foil. Jefferson is a Democrat but I hardly think that the government was in the wrong to go after him just because he was in the opposition party, and my goodness! he’s still serving in Congress today.
So I don’t see any evidence that the political corruption prosecutions were themselves political — it seems to have been pretty much even-handed; to the extent that more Republicans got harsh treatment, well, let’s not forget that they were in the majority in Congress until very recently, so it’s natural that more dirty money would flow their way. If you’re going to bribe someone, you’ll try to bribe someone who can do something for you, so you’ll make a good return on your money. Majority members are better able to do that than minority members. Now that Democrats are in the majority again, they will have the opportunity to tap in to filthy lucre once more — some will, I’m sure, and some won’t. But it only seems natural that guys like Ney and Cunningham would have had more opportunities to be bribed than their Democratic counterparts back before January of 2007.
So maybe that’s why these attorneys were fired — revenge for Ney and Cunningham? That just doesn’t wash and no report or commentary that I’ve read suggests that these events are linked. It isn’t revenge for Scooter Libby, whose prosecution was handled independently. It seems to be more of a case of these U.S. Attorneys simply not submitting to control by the Attorney General or the White House in a more general sense. And they are supposed to be controlled by the White House; that is why they are political appointees and not civil servants.
So while I have sympathy for these very capable attorneys who lost their jobs due to the whims of politics, and while I would prefer someone else were the Attorney General, this is not a good reason for Gonzales’ resignation. As I wrote in the title of the post, I might be missing something here. But it seems to me that the President has the power to control his political appointees.
