Breaking the Camel's Back

If ever there was any doubt that George W. Bush needs to be impeached, the testimony we heard yesterday should lay it to rest. A former top aide to Attorney General John Ashcroft testified yesterday about a series of events that sounds more like the climax of a Hollywood thriller than like a government playing by the rules. From the Post:

On the night of March 10, 2004, as Attorney General John D. Ashcroft lay ill in an intensive-care unit, his deputy, James B. Comey, received an urgent call.

White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales and President Bush's chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., were on their way to the hospital to persuade Ashcroft to reauthorize Bush's domestic surveillance program, which the Justice Department had just determined was illegal.

In vivid testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, Comey said he alerted FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and raced, sirens blaring, to join Ashcroft in his hospital room, arriving minutes before Gonzales and Card. Ashcroft, summoning the strength to lift his head and speak, refused to sign the papers they had brought. Gonzales and Card, who had never acknowledged Comey's presence in the room, turned and left.

That's right, John Ashcroft, who liberals love to hate for trampling civil liberties with the Patriot Act and various other awful conservative offenses, is actually the good guy here. He recognized that Bush's blatantly illegal domestic spying order was illegal, and he refused to sign off on it. The second in command of the Department of Justice had to bring the head of the FBI to Ashcroft's hospital bed to keep Bush's goons from forcing his signature.

Apparently Comey also testified that if he, Ashcroft, Ashcroft's chief of staff, and the head of the FBI hadn't all threatened to resign over the program, Bush would have gone ahead with it anyway. Now, just to be clear, the program is still illegal, to this very day. So whatever change Bush conceded to in order to appease Comey et al. doesn't solve the problem or make Comey and Ashcroft into actual good guys. But in this Administration, just being less evil makes you look like a saint.

As Glenn Greenwald implies today, there is no solution for the problems this creates short of impeachment:

The overarching point here, as always, is that it is simply crystal clear that the President consciously and deliberately violated the law and committed multiple felonies by eavesdropping on Americans in violation of the law.

Recall that the only federal court to rule on this matter has concluded that the NSA program violated both federal law and the U.S. Constitution...

Yet even once Bush knew that both Aschcroft and Comey believed the eavesdropping was illegal, he ordered it to continue anyway. As Anonymous Liberal wrote yesterday:

That's a rather stunning fact, and one that I wish at least a few mainstream journalists would attempt to grasp the significance of. The White House authorized a program that everyone of significance in the Justice Department had determined to be lacking any legal basis. They willfully violated the law.

As Dan Froomkin writes today, trying to get a sick guy to sign a paper is never going to be considered the worst thing this Administration has done. But it may be the one thing that makes all the other stuff make sense. It might exemplify the rest of the misconduct, somehow symbolizing it for people who don't have time to follow the ins and outs of emails about purging prosecutors. It might, in other words, step into the role the Mark Foley scandal played last fall. To quote myself:

the Mark Foley scandal from last October--it's not that Republican leadership really influenced policy by protecting a sexual predator, it's [that] they helped people condense the narrative of corruption and arrogance that surrounded the Republican Congress. We also know from the groundbreaking work of Samuel Popkin that voters tend to form a narrative and then adjust it with new information, rather than constantly weighing and reweighing all the evidence.

But as cool as I feel for drawing that analogy, I felt even more vindicated to see the following in the Post editorial page:

JAMES B. COMEY, the straight-as-an-arrow former No. 2 official at the Justice Department, yesterday offered the Senate Judiciary Committee an account of Bush administration lawlessness so shocking it would have been unbelievable coming from a less reputable source.

You may recall that my very most recent blog post was about how the Administration got away with so much just by doing things that people couldn't believe an Administration would do. At that time, I relied on Kevin Drum's assessment of the situation, which I now re-cite:

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.

So the Washington Post editorial board provides the other reason this may be such an important development in the scandal. Just to review, the first reason is that this is easy to remember, and it symbolizes the larger problem. The second reason is that the gatekeepers of establishment knowledge, who are too blind to see the obvious when it is spread out in front of them, may finally get it when it is sitting in front of them nicely gift-wrapped. Let's hope so.

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.

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.

Picking Nits?

Now that Democrats run Congress, some interesting investigations are getting underway, just as Republicans warned us they would. There are now some big, sexy scandals brewing as a result. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) has been holding hearings on pretty much every aspect of the corruption and incompetence surrounding Iraq. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) has been pursuing the sordid US Attorney firing scandal. But there is a much less sexy scandal brewing as well: White House staffers have been misusing their email accounts.

Various rules and regulations demand the following of White House employees:

• Using official government resources for political/party purposes is prohibited
• Using political/party resources for official government business is prohibited

Many White House employees do political work in addition to their official government duties, which is not prohibited. In order to comply with the demands of the rules, the Republican National Committee provided many White House employees, especially Karl Rove, with laptops and Blackberries to use in performing their party duties. You see, it would be not just unethical but illegal for them to use their White House email accounts to conduct party business.

The problem is that they also used their RNC emails for official government business. Business such as the politically motivated firings of US Attorneys. Froomkin explains:

The use of non-government e-mails first became an issue about four weeks ago, when some of the e-mails turned over in a congressional investigation of the firing of eight U.S. attorneys showed that Rove deputy Scott Jennings repeatedly used an RNC e-mail address (sjennings@gwb43.com) in his official communications. One e-mail to Rove was sent to a kr@georgewbush.com address.

But the problem extends beyond just using the wrong email account for the wrong job function. The White House email servers are set up to automatically back up every single email, while the RNC email servers allow users to permanently delete whatever they want. Sure enough, many vital emails were in fact deleted:

Countless e-mails to and from many key White House staffers have been deleted -- lost to history and placed out of reach of congressional subpoenas -- due to a brazen violation of internal White House policy that was allowed to continue for more than six years, the White House acknowledged yesterday.
...
Since 2004, White House staffers using those accounts have been able to save their e-mail indefinitely -- but have also been able to delete whatever they felt like deleting. By comparison, the White House e-mail system preserves absolutely everything forever, in accordance with the Presidential Records Act.

It is fairly easy to come up with some knee-jerk objections to Waxman's pursuit of such a minor 'scandal'. One could argue that Republicans all warned everyone during the 2006 campaign that a Democratic Congress would just do non-stop investigations instead of pursuing a positive agenda, and the email scandal plays right into that narrative. Since there are so many other scandals going on right now, one could argue that citizens will get so-called "scandal fatigue", whereby the marginal increase in shame per scandal goes down as the number of scandals goes up. One could also argue that by pursuing small-bore stuff like email archiving, the Democrats are just going to look like they're being vindictive as a result of the Clinton impeachment.

But, assuming Democrats handle themselves correctly, I believe this email scandal could be an essential piece of the narrative Democrats ought to be creating for 2008. For one thing, all the fishiness around Iraq and the US Attorney scandal has established a narrative of malfeasance in the White House that puts the onus on to the Administration to counter. Even if people don't pay too much particular attention to it, the email scandal could help contribute to this narrative.

An analogy can be drawn to the Mark Foley scandal from last October--it's not that Republican leadership really influenced policy by protecting a sexual predator, it's they helped people condense the narrative of corruption and arrogance that surrounded the Republican Congress. We also know from the groundbreaking work of Samuel Popkin that voters tend to form a narrative and then adjust it with new information, rather than constantly weighing and reweighing all the evidence. The email scandal could thus be extremely helpful as one more thread in a richly woven tapestry of corruption.

But better yet, since RNC email accounts were involved, it provides a link between the Bush White House and the entire Republican party (by definition) that, if properly invoked, could help in virtually every other campaign around the nation next year.

The Tides of Change Reach Vote Fraud

News from Florida
First, the big story: Florida has rolled back its odious voting restrictions for ex-felons. The story begins many years ago, at the tail end of the Civil Rights era. Many states were frustrated at their powerlessness to deny the vote to black people, so they restricted voting by ex-felons, who they knew would be mostly black as a result of other existing inequities.

As bad as that sounds, in Florida's case it has actually been worse than that. The 2000 presidential election is mostly remembered for the recount debacle in Florida, but there is a racial story behind that debacle. What jumps to mind about that election are images like little old ladies (lifelong Democrats) having their ballots counted for Pat Buchanan, chads hanging, and protesters (who turned out to be paid GOP operatives rather passionate citizens) demanding an end to the recount.

It just so happens that there is pretty solid evidence that Gore really did win that election by a couple hundred votes, which would be common knowledge if the recount had been allowed to proceed. Unfortunately, in one of the most disgraceful moments in its history, the Supreme Court stepped in with a highly biased, partisan, and poorly reasoned ruling to stop the recount, which legal scholars have strongly criticized.

But Gore would have won by a much more comfortable margin if ex-felons, who are disproportionately black and therefore disproportionately Democratic, had been allowed to vote. And Gore's margin would have been much larger still if the ex-felon voting restriction hadn't been illegally applied to tens of thousands of non-felons. Greg Palast explained in 2002:

Two of these “scrub lists,” as officials called them, were distributed to counties in the months before the election with orders to remove the voters named. Together the lists comprised nearly 1 percent of Florida's electorate and nearly 3 percent of its African-American voters. Most of the voters (such as “David Butler,” (1); a name that appears 77 times in Florida phone books) were selected because their name, gender, birthdate and race matched - or nearly matched - one of the tens of millions of ex-felons in the United States. Neither DBT nor the state conducted any further research to verify the matches...

Thomas Alvin Cooper (2), twenty-eight, was flagged because of a crime for which he will be convicted in the year 2007. According to Florida's elections division, this intrepid time-traveler will cover his tracks by moving to Ohio, adding a middle name, and changing his race...

Rather than release this whacky data to skeptical counties, Janet Mudrow, state liaison to DBT, suggested that “blanks would be preferable in these cases.” (Harper’s counted 4,917 blank conviction dates.) The one county that checked each of the 694 names on its local list could verify only 34 as actual felony convicts.

(my emphasis; original emphasis removed)

Florida's move to finally allow many ex-felons to vote is therefore not just a breakthrough for the civil rights of ex-felons. It also has huge implications for the civil rights of every black person in Florida, any one of whom could have been removed from voter roles very easily through this type of chicanery.

Nationwide Implications
The roll-back of ex-felon restrictions in Florida was spearheaded by a Republican, new Governor Charlie Crist. I was shocked to hear that a Republican had led the charge, but apparently Crist was genuinely struck by a sense of injustice tugging at his conscience. It's an inspiring example that goes to prove that merely being a Republican doesn't automatically entail being a bad person inside.

But it helps. For example, former governor Jeb Bush, who presided over the illegal felon disenfranchisement in 2000 to help his brother, is a rotten shell of a human being. Less publicized than even the 2000 disenfranchisement in Florida was the 2004 disenfranchisement there, which Jeb also presided over.

The 2004 edition was actually led by Karl Rove protégé Tim Griffin. After the recent purge that has become such a scandal, Griffin was nominated to take over as US Attorney in Arkansas. As I mentioned in Wednesday's entry, it should be no surprise that Republicans want subpoena powers for one of their dirtiest thugs in the state where Hillary Clinton spent most of her adult life.

The 2004 voter suppression, as orchestrated by Griffin, is emblematic of the new approach Republicans take to voter suppression in general: challenging the ballots and registrations of regular minorities, regardless of their criminal record. Griffin was challenging absentee ballots from black communities in Florida, but a favored tactic in other states has been to challenge registrations from registration drives by Democratic groups. This tactic is likely to have played a large role in deciding Ohio in 2004, for example.

But Griffin isn't the only connection between this tactic and the US Attorney scandal. It turns out some of the purged attorneys were fired for inadequately prosecuting such cases of alleged voter fraud.

This recent tactic is directly connected to Karl Rove (via Griffin), but aggressive pursuit of voter fraud has Rove written all over it, anyway. The defining Rove strategy, generally speaking, is to take your own weakness and turn it into your opponent's weakness. Think of how in 2004 draft-dodging George W. Bush somehow looked like the patriotic defender of his country while decorated veteran John Kerry looked like the pansy. It's the same deal in this case: Republicans commit massive voter suppression, yet they try to make it look like Democrats are the ones manipulating the voter roles.

Conclusion
The recent Florida decision and the uncovering of the crass politicization of justice represented by the US Attorney purge are steps in the right direction. I compliment Crist for listening to his conscience and helping more people vote instead of less, like the rest of his party seems to be doing. Ken Blackwell, the Ohio Secretary of State in 2004, lost badly in his bid for the Ohio governor's mansion last year. Conscientious liberals have launched a project to get responsible people in Secretary of State offices across the nation. We're not there yet, but the tides of voter suppression may be turning.

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.