Time to get rid of Gonzo

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Nancy Pelosi is the latest prominent Democrat to call for Gonzales's removal: "I think what is unfolding looks pretty bad for the administration as well as Alberto Gonzales... I don't think Alberto Gonzales fundamentally understood the difference between being the president's lawyer and the attorney general of the United States and the premier defender of the Constitution."

That's right. Gonzales is, and always has been, a loyal partisan hack, Bush's legal advisor, enabler, and defender both in Austin and in Washington. In this case, the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, either he didn't know what was going on, in which case he is at best a figurehead Attorney General blissfully unaware of what even his immediate subordinates are doing, or he did know what was going on, in which case he approved of, and perhaps signed off on, the overt partisanization of the justice system, judging U.S. attorneys on the basis of fidelity to Bush and the GOP (and perhaps whether they were targeting the White House and its allies). Either way, he is unfit to be attorney general -- and this on top of many other reasons why he's unfit to hold the position.

But it may not matter what Pelosi and the Democrats have to say. According to The Politico's Mike Allen, "Republican officials operating at the behest of the White House have begun seeking a possible successor to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, whose support among GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill has collapsed." In other words, Gonzales is already on the way out. It's only a matter of time.

Possible replacements: Homeland Security Secretary (and Katrina bungler) Michael Chertoff, Bush homeland security advisor (and Bush insider) Frances Townsend, former Attorney General (and renditioner of Maher Arar to Syria) Larry Thompson, and former Solicitor General (and Bush lawyer in Bush v. Gore) Ted Olson. It may be that anyone would be better than Gonzales. Or it may not matter at all. Unless Bush were to nominate someone who is truly independent -- and that seems unlikely -- the new attorney general will still be in office to do Bush's bidding.

But what also concerns me here is that if Gonzales, as expected (given what a loyalist he is), resigns and takes the fall, there may be little effort outside of the TPM-led blogosphere to look beyond Gonzales to reveal who in the White House (i.e., Karl Rove) was actually calling the shots. Because it wasn't Gonzales. This was political. And, for Bush, politics begins and ends with those in his inner circle. That's where the shot-callers are to be found.