US Congress, featuring Fleetwood Mac

The House Judiciary Committee invited Alberto Gonzales to testify yesterday, but he apparently heard an invitation to come tell lies, in the finest Fleetwood Mac tradition.

Although, to be fair to Gonzales, some of the things he said would be more accurately classified as non-sequiters than lies. Slate's Dahlia Lithwick has been providing excellent coverage of the Gonzales saga, and she chimes in with an perceptive take on the proceedings in yesterday's issue.

Lithwick describes "a divine moment of stunned silence when he insists, toward the end of the hearing, that 'it would be almost impossible to make a political decision in the Justice Department. ... If that happened we would read about it in the paper.' " Technically, this is a lie. The paper trail has shown just how easy it would be to make a political decision in the DoJ. You can also tell it's a lie, because you have in fact read about it in the papers. But it's just such an obvious, brazen lie, really only half-heartedly masquerading as truth, that it seems like a joke. A non-sequiter, something so random as to be inherently hilarious.

The "testimony" Gonzales gave yesterday is full of these fun little nonsensical moments. Lithwick goes on:

[T]he AG proves himself to be as defiantly incurious as his boss. He tells the committee at various times that he didn't read the CRS report detailing how previous administrations handled U.S. attorney dismissals. He didn't read the University of Minnesota study that broke down the disparity in investigations of Democrats over Republicans. He tells Maxine Waters, D-Calif., that he still has not read the fired U.S. attorneys' personnel files. He notes several times that he hasn't much read the newspapers. He tells Sanchez that he still doesn't know who at Justice had more than "limited input" into these decisions. The most revealing moment, perhaps, is when Gonzales inadvertently confesses that some members of this secret cabal of senior leaders may not have even "known that they were involved in making this list."

These statements are probably a lot more true, but they have the same non-sequiter property that the lies do: instead of describing something obviously false, though, they describe someone obviously incompetent.

For someone who is so incompetent at running the Department of Justice (and at testifying before Congress, for that matter), Gonzales sure sounds like he was relaxed. But why shouldn't he be? He doesn't serve the American people, he serves the White House. And the White House is behind him all the way, and he knows it. Plus, the longer he doesn't resign, the easier it is for Republicans to claim that the fact he hasn't resigned shows nothing bad could have happened.

There are several possible reasons why Bush might not want to fire Gonzales. For one, if Gonzales leaves, Bush will need to submit a new candidate for AG to Senate confirmation hearings. If that happens, all sorts of fun documents will probably come to light. For another, Bush is obdurate and often refuses to do the right thing simply because he wasn't doing it already (see also: Iraq, invasion and occupation of).

But the most convincing explanation is the one Kevin Drum has articulated:

One of the great discoveries of the Republican Party over the past decade or two is that an awful lot of the rules we take for granted are, in reality, just traditions. Like redistricting only once a decade, for example, or keeping House votes open for 15 minutes. And what Republicans have found out is that if you have the balls to do it, you can just ignore tradition and no one can stop you. It's that simple. Alberto Gonzales has learned this lesson well. Normally, cabinet officers who have been caught in multiple obvious lies have to either resign or else seriously try to defend themselves. But Gonzales realizes this is just tradition.

I would add to his examples the tradition of not lying. That seems basic and obvious, but I really think respect for that tradition is what allowed many people to rationalize letting us get into Iraq in the first place. The evidence for WMDs was shaky at best, but surely the President wouldn't say it if it weren't true. Either way, Drum is right: our democracy is not well set up to stop people who intentionally try to destroy it from the inside.

Rahmblin' Man

Anyone who read this blog during the 2006 midterms (i.e. my Mom) knows how many, uh, suggestions I had for the way Rahm Emanuel should do his job as DCCC chair. But I tried not to lose sight of the fact that Rahm and I are still on the same team, even if we don't see eye to eye all the time. That's why I was so happy to see the text of his recent speech to the Brookings Institute.

Rahm's speech was about the over-politicization of government that the Administration has engineered. As anyone who has read this blog lately knows, I've been interested in the purposeful destruction of the Enlightenment principles of liberalism that have shaped our government since at least 1789. So it would seem that Rahm and I have some real common ground here.

Some choice quotes from the speech:

[T]he U.S. Attorney scandal will be to public corruption what Hurricane Katrina was to incompetence in the Bush Administration.
...
Instead of promoting solutions to our nation's broad challenges, the Bush Administration used all the levers of power to promote their party and its narrow interests.
...
The Attorney General could offer no coherent explanation for the [US Attorney] fiasco, because to do so would unveil the guiding principle at the core of this White House—insinuating partisan politics into every aspect of government and bringing politics into what used to be a political-free zone—the Justice Department.
...
The corporations don't have to lobby the government, because they are the government.

Unfortunately, just when it looks like Rahm might have gotten himself re-invited to my birthday party, he ends up not going far enough. After mentioning examples of politicization such as cronyism in Iraq reconstruction contracting, outsourcing Walter Reed hospital operations, quashing climate change data, revelations from former White House insiders O'Neill and DiIulio about the lack of policy interest, the student loan scandal, the recent GSA/Hatch Act controversy, and the RNC email controversy, his analysis basically peters out. He concludes that political appointees are a good thing but that these particular ones are too political.

It's not that he's wrong, it's just that he undersells the danger the Administration poses. The corruption we've seen isn't some freak occurrence of corruption, it is a purposeful occurrence of an active effort to destroy our way of government. It's not a culture of corruption, it's an ethos of corruption.

Mark Schmitt, in a review of the new Rahm book The Thumpin’: How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Ended the Republican Revolution, emphasizes the essence of the Rahm situation. As he says, it is probably an exaggeration to claim that the Democrats won in spite of Rahm rather than because of him. After all, he did raise a lot of money, and he did seem to understand some things. To wit,

And that is what makes Emanuel a little different from, say, former Democratic National Committee chair Terry MacAuliffe: he understands that politics has to be
about something, and more than just a vague statement of values.

However, the need to drag Rahm kicking and screaming into talking about the war and contesting more seats still haunt his record. Plus, he's kind of a jerk. As Schmitt explains,

[A]s a twenty-five-year-old working on Senator Paul Simon’s first campaign, Emanuel was known as “the nuclear fund-raiser,” and colleagues would gather to eavesdrop on him loudly accusing elderly Jewish donors of betraying the state of Israel if they failed to max out, in their grandchildren’s names as well as their own, to Simon’s campaign. Apparently the strategy worked.

Together, all this evidence highlights the Rahm dilemma: you like having someone feisty on your team who won't take no for an answer, who knows it takes more than statements of values to win. You just wish he could take it to the next level, where he would understand the bigger philosophy instead of just the list of violations or the intimidation of elderly donors.

Unitary Execution

When people describe Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as a "loyal Bushie", they are essentially referring to his support for the wacko 'theory' of the unitary executive. For example:

As long as Gonzales remains front and center in the furor over last year's mass firing of U.S. attorneys -- as long as his goofy stonewalling continues to distract attention from all the elements of the purge that point so incriminatingly toward the White House -- he simply enhances his position as the ultimate "loyal Bushie."

The 'theory' basically holds that the President is an elected autocrat who doesn't need one or even two coequal branches of government in order to preside. It is the unifying principle behind basically every disgusting thing the Bush Administration has done. To wit,

Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez sent a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter “clarifying” testimony he gave on February 6. In what amounted to a “By the way, I kind of perjured myself before you,” Gonzales said that when he said the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” was “all that [President Bush] has authorized” in the area of warrantless surveillance, “I was confining my remarks to the Terrorist Surveillance Program as described by the President.” This tautological sleight-of-hand can lead one only to conclude that there are other “programs” of surveillance. But don’t ask what they might be.

Gonzales also noted that when he said—three times—that the Justice Department had not conducted any analysis of whether purely domestic wiretapping without a warrant might be legal, he might have left the “misimpression” that the Justice Department had not conducted any analysis of whether purely domestic wiretapping without a warrant might be legal. Oops.

The response from the Judiciary Committee, of course, was a great big pile of nothing. By now such admissions have become so routine, they fail to bring attention beyond a story buried deep in the back pages of The Washington Post. After all, this is the administration that leaked the identity of a CIA operative in order to discredit a political opponent. (Remember Bush’s promise to fire anyone involved?) This is the president that claims “we don’t torture,” then fights to retain his prerogative to torture. When forced by political fallout to sign a law outlawing said torture, he issues a “signing statement” making clear his intention to ignore the law when he feels like it. Potential appointees to scientific panels are asked whether they voted for President Bush. Regulations on environmental and occupational safety that the administration finds distasteful lie fallow and unenforced. Treaties signed by the United States are derided as “quaint,” then cast aside. When the Government Accountability Office issues a ruling that the administration’s use of phony “video news releases” purporting to be real news constitutes “covert propaganda” and is therefore illegal, the White House simply ignores them and continues the propaganda campaign.

Gonzales' testimony before the Senate last week on the US Attorney scandal was another perfect example of the unitary executive in execution. The Justice Department is of course a cabinet department, and cabinet departments are part of the executive branch, which make them virtually indistinguishable from the (Bush) White House. For example, since Clinton left office, the number of White House officials who are allowed to comment on ongoing DoJ investigations has increased by over 10,000%!

Bush issued some effusive praise yesterday and over the weekend for the outstanding (but plainly awful) performance Gonzales gave last week. I believe it comes back to two explanations, the first of which is the heavy involvement of the White House, and especially Karl Rove, in the US Attorney firings.

One White House adviser (who asked not to be ID'ed talking about sensitive issues) said the support reflected Bush's own view that a Gonzales resignation would embolden the Dems to go after other targets—like Karl Rove. "This is about Bush saying, 'Screw you'," said the adviser, conceding that a Gonzales resignation might still be inevitable.

The other reason, though, is this business with the unitary executive. If the executive branch really is allowed to govern without the other branches of government (bear with me here), then testifying before Congress is a sort of optional theatricality at best.

For anyone who regularly reads the progressive blogs, Slate's Dahlia Lithwick was a little late to the party, but her article on Friday was still right on (and still lightyears ahead of the media establishment):

Assuming the president watched so much as 10 minutes of his attorney general being poleaxed by even rudimentary questions from the Senate judiciary committee, it strains credulity to believe that Gonzales still has Bush's "full confidence."
...
For six impressive hours, the attorney general embodied the core principles that he is not beholden to Congress, that the Senate has no authority over him, and that he was only there as a favor to them in their funny little fact-finding mission.
...
This record reflects either a Harvard-trained lawyer—and former state Supreme Court judge—with absolutely no command of the facts or the law, or it reveals a proponent of the unitary executive theory with absolutely nothing to prove. Gonzales' failure to even mount a defense; his posture of barely tolerating congressional inquiries; his refusal to concede that he owed the Senate any explanation or any evidence; his refusal to even accept that he bore some burden of proof—all of it tots up to a masterful display of the perfect contempt felt by the Bush executive branch for this Congress and its pretensions of oversight. In the plainest sense, Gonzales elevated the Bush legal doctrine of "Because I said so" into a public spectacle.

This is yet another reminder of why fighting Bush tooth and nail is so important. This battle isn't just about whether some bad policies get enacted and whether some bad people get positions in government. This isn't just about what happens in Iraq or what happens to the economy. This is about government itself, about our way of life and our very identity as Americans. The Administration is attacking liberalism itself, and it is absolutely imperative that Bush be stopped if we have any intention of continuing to live in a democracy.

Enlightenment Watch - April

In a liberal democracy, the government is the people. You may be familiar with this concept from examples such as the times I have written about it or ambient culture, like The People vs. Larry Flynt. The concept of the government and the people being coterminous stems from the Enlightenment philosophers. The ultimate power in any society, according to that view, rests with its people--agents of a state are only using power delegated to them by the people.

In a totalitarian dictatorship, by contrast, the government is the party. You may be familiar with this concept from the examples of the Soviet Union or Mussolini's Italy. The concept of the government and the party being coterminous stems from the legacy of every warlord, despot, and regional strongman in the history of humanity--whatever faction seizes control is the only one with a right to power.

The Bush Administration, Karl Rove, and other Republicans have made it more clear than ever that under their watch, the government of the United States will be coterminous with the Republican Party. The continuing sagas of the US Attorney firing scandal and the suddenly disputed right of habeas corpus, joined by a new scandal at the General Services Administration, all reveal the sad truth of this Republican governing philosophy.

Habeas Corpus
Glenn Greenwald, the blogging jewel in Salon.com's crown, filed a little-reported update in the Republican war on the 800-year-old right this weekend. According to Greenwald, two of three Republican frontrunners for the 2008 nomination are convinced habeas corpus exists. As far as I know, John McCain still supports habeas, but neither Romney nor Giuliani do.

We're not just talking about some contemporary issue like trade deficits or abortion here: habeas corpus is the very foundation of all democracy. The importance of this issue was summed up nicely by that famous bleeding heart hippie liberal Winston Churchill (as quoted by Andrew Sullivan by way of Greenwald):

The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him judgment by his peers for an indefinite period, is in the highest degree odious, and is the foundation of all totalitarian governments whether Nazi or Communist. [emphasis added]

GSA Corruption
It was revealed this month that the General Services Administration, which oversees office supplies and real estate for the federal government, was being directed to help Republican candidates win elections in 2008. The GSA is not the first place you would look for partisanship, especially since using its resources and capabilities for partisan purposes is illegal. But one of Karl Rove's deputies was dispatched to give a slideshow on such strategies this January.

US Attorneys
A typical Republican defense for the firing of the eight US Attorneys is that all US Attorneys serve at the pleasure of the President, and he may remove them for any or no reason. I don't know of anyone who is disputing that fact. But the Justice Department initially claimed that the USA's were fired for performance reasons, yet it has become obvious that they were removed for political reasons. We probably wouldn't have had a scandal if the Administration had just been up front about that. But, like the best mystery novel detectives, sometimes the best way to solve a case is to wait for the perp to slip up.

"But detective, how did you know I committed the murder?"
"I didn't. You just told me."

The politicized aspect of the US Attorney firings that gets the most attention is the involvement of many of the fired prosecutors in corruption and fraud probes. For example, Carol Lam was fired from her position in Southern California after getting a conviction on Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-CA) in a defense contracting corruption case. Recently it also became apparent that Lam's ongoing corruption probe was getting close to the Vice President's office. US Attorneys in New Mexico and Washington were allegedly fired for failing to adequately prosecute election fraud, which turned out to mean they didn't manufacture the evidence their superiors wanted to see on Democratic election fraud.

Less attention has been paid to the proposed (and subsequently withdrawn) appointment of Tim Griffin to replace Bud Cummins as US Attorney in Arkansas. You may be thinking, "So what? It's a politically appointed post, why not install a former Karl Rove protégé like Griffin?" It just so happens that Griffin used to be an opposition researcher for the RNC. During that time, Griffin likely committed grave voter fraud felonies himself. More to the point, it would seem like an unlikely coincidence that the Administration wants to give their top opposition researcher subpoena power in the home state of Hillary Clinton, just in time for her presidential candidacy.

As Johnathan Alter summarizes it in this Olbermann clip,

what Rove was trying to do is in jurisdiction by jurisdiction, protect Republicans, go after Democrats, and essentially turn our criminal justice system into what they have in a banana republic [i.e. any totalitarian system].

Conclusion
I should qualify that I don't think most rank and file Republicans are interested in destroying democracy from its very foundations. But the Republicans in power sure seem to be. This means that in this case the opponents of liberalism are probably not accurately described as conservatives. But what, then?

Andrew Sullivan makes a crucial distinction between membership blocs of the Republican party: "If conservatism is about preserving one's own past, fundamentalism is about erasing it and starting afresh." There is no question that things like habeas corpus are part of "one's own past" for most Americans, and the people in power are obviously not interested in "preserving" them. Yet, Bush & Co. also don't seem to be interested in "starting afresh" so much as in recreating the type of despotism that dominated the world prior to 1776.

Enlightenment Watch

I've blogged previously about Bush's contempt for the enlightenment and about his dream of becoming a Sun King. A couple things came up last week that demand an update to this line of criticism. But first, a trip down memory lane.

My opponent thinks the government -- the surplus is the government's money. That's not what I think. I think it's the hard-working people of America's money and I want to share some of that money with you so you have more money to build and save and dream for your families. It's a difference of opinion.

This quote is from George W. Bush in the October 10, 2000 presidential debate. Everyone knows that because of Bush and his insatiable desire for cutting taxes and increasing spending, we have a crushing deficit far larger than anything we could have imagined in 2000. I would contend that having a solvent government would have helped the American people more than shifting the tax burden off the absurdly wealthy and onto the middle class.

But what he describes in this passage is goes beyond the woulda-shoulda-couldas of policy. It is less a a difference of opinion than a difference in the fundamental philosophy of what government is. Al Gore, apparently, supported a classical liberal view, the view that this country was founded on, the view that came out of the Enlightenment itself. George W. Bush supported, and supports to this day, a regressive view that would take us back before the Enlightenment.

You see, in a liberal democracy, the people are the government. There is no opposition between paying down the debt and rewarding the people for their hard work and prudence. The people of the United States are in debt up to their eyeballs, both personally and socially.

Fun fact: repealing the estate tax entirely would cost the people of the United States over $8 billion over the next ten years from the Walton family (owners of Wal*Mart) alone.

Anyway, on to the two updates: outsourcing tax rules and signing statements.

#1: a continued emphasis on destroying the rational-bureaucratic norms that are a central feature of all modern societies. This time it's back to the IRS, which apparently is pushing to allow private tax attorneys and accountants to just rewrite tax rules as they see fit.

In the Conservative mind, this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Who better to write tax rules than the people who deal with them every day? So much the better that these people are willing to do it for free! There's probably no catch, and if there were, it probably wouldn't be based on rigging the tax rules to favor their clients.

In the liberal, Enlightenment view, by contrast, the people regulate themselves through the intermediary of a meritocratic bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is employed using money collected from the people and directed by politicians elected by the people. This system is good because everyone involved is accountable to everyone else. Doing it their way, the doers are accountable only to their captain of industry clients.

#2: the issue of signing statements is finally upon us in a much more tangible way. To provide a brief refresher, signing statements are the mechanism Bush has been using to assert an unjustifiably extravagant amount of Constitutional authority. The hubbub over signing statements is about a year old, but heretofore it has been largely hypothetically. Last week, the FBI put a much more real face on the situation.

It all begins with the reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act in the fall of 2005. One of the measures included was an unreasonable ability for the FBI to infringe on privacy with virtually no supervision. Some people complained about this at the time, but of course that would have meant the terrorists win. To the surprise of approximately no one, the FBI promptly turned around and abused their awesome, completely unchecked power by breaking even the modest oversight requirements in the law.

The connection here is that the signing statement Bush issued with the reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act is the very one that drew attention to the controversy over signing statements to begin with. And that signing statement spelled out very clearly that Bush intended to ignore the portions of the law that the FBI has now, indeed, ignored.

This could force a real showdown over the Constitution, which one has to believe was the intention of the Administration all along. After all, if Bush wanted to just get away with one, why would he announce he was going to break the law? Democrats in Congress, and self-respecting pundits, are already making noise about getting Alberto Gonzales to resign. Between this scandal and the politically motivated firing of otherwise competent US Attorneys, it is starting to look like Gonzales may not be able to make it too much longer, which can only be good for the country: it's time we stopped assaulting the Enlightenment.

Law Giver -or- Moses and The Burning Bush

George W. Bush is a divine law giver, sanctioned by God to bring rules to all mankind. He need look nowhere but inside himself to determine what these laws are. At least, that's the impression you get if you look at his administration's actions over the last couple years.

An excellent diary today by Kagro X over at DailyKos puts this fact in stark relief by discussing the recent flap over Douglas Feith's "inappropriate" but not "unauthorized" intelligence memo. But before getting into the Feith situation, I'm going to lift the Nixon quote Kagro X cites:

Frost: "So ... what ... you're saying is that there are certain situations ... where the president can decide that it's in the best interests of the nation or something, and do something illegal."

Nixon: "Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal."

Frost: " By definition."

Nixon: "Exactly, exactly. If the president, for example, approves something because of the national security ... then the president's decision in that instance is one that enables those who carry it out to carry it out without violating a law."

The fact that Nixon is the one who made this comment is (a) not surprising at all and (b) the connection we need to the current administration. People like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld came of political age in the Ford administration, and they have a huge chip on their shoulders from when Congress reined in Nixon's absurd theories about the executive. Much of the unitary executive theory that crackpots in the White House subscribe to today is basically a continuation of Nixon's plans to bring Law to Man.

Which brings us back to Feith's comment that his unsavory, reprehensible, morally odious memo was not unauthorized. Who cares whether the thing was authorized if it was illegal, right? The Administration cares, because whatever the president approves becomes legal. As Kagro X also points out, that's why Alberto Gonzales felt justified to tell the Senate that the Administration was operating within the law on its blatantly illegal wiretapping program. Since the president approved that program, in the eyes of theorists at the White House, it was legal.

This concept of the "unitary executive branch" is dangerous and illegitimate, and it underlies everything Bush does. Case in point, his now-infamous signing statements. At a far higher rate than any previous president, Bush has issued statements when he signs laws that say that he will interpret the law in question "in a manner consistent with his constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch."

Note that Bush does not say he will or won't disregard any law in any specific way. All he says is that he will interpret them however his royal whim dictates.

In addition to ignoring any bill Congress passes, Bush's protection of "the...executive branch" apparently extends to ignoring any oversight Congress attempts to exert over the various cabinet departments. Senators Grassley, Leahy, and Specter (at least) have voiced strong opposition to the non-responsiveness (and at times obstructiveness) of the Department of Justice under Alberto Gonzales.

Not only does DOJ apparently refuse to provide its own responsive documents at the request of Senate committees, but it also tells other executive branch departments not to do so either. You see, DOJ is responsible for handling the legal representation of all federal agencies, and as their attorney, it has advised them not to comply with Congressional oversight requests.

In this context, what would normally be merely a disgusting misuse of power for political purposes starts to take on a much more sinister character: DOJ has also been firing US Attorneys from offices around the country to replace them with hyper-partisan loyalists. They may also take advantage of a provision of the PATRIOT Act that will allow these appointments to become indefinite without Senate confirmation. Not that they need a legal justification since every bead of Bush's sweat is as good as law.

If Bush & Co. are to be believed, he is the only part of government that matters. Heck, I bet he could play all nine positions on a baseball team, too. But I don't think this is what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they set up three separate branches of government any more than Abner Doubleday had one-person baseball teams in mind. Since Bush's most significant experience before becoming governor of Texas was (poorly) running the Texas Rangers baseball team, maybe this shouldn't come as such a surprise.