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Editorial: After Gonzales
The attorney general should go. In his place, we need someone tough enough to reject partisan overtures.
Los Angeles Times
April 23, 2007
THE UNKINDEST CUTS for Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales during last week's appalling appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee came not from Democrats but from fellow Republicans. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) told the attorney general that he should resign. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) observed that Gonzales' credibility had been "significantly impaired."
Sooner or later, Gonzales or President Bush will take the hint. The question then becomes: What sort of replacement should Bush nominate? History suggests several possible models.
Should the new attorney general come from the Senate, from which Richard Nixon plucked Ohio Republican William Saxbe as the Watergate coverup was unraveling? Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) has been suggested for the Saxbe role, on the theory that Democrats would deal more kindly with a colleague. Or should Bush follow the lead of Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, who tried to exorcise the ghosts of Watergate by tapping the apolitical legal scholar Edward Levi?
The best model for Bush may come from the 1980s: Ronald Reagan's choice of Dick Thornburgh to succeed Edwin Meese. Thornburgh was hardly apolitical, having served as the Republican governor of Pennsylvania. But, in contrast to Meese, he wasn't a Reagan crony, and he had served as a federal prosecutor and head of the Justice Department's criminal division.
The attorney general isn't only the head of the Justice Department; he's also a member of the president's Cabinet. Gonzales failed miserably at balancing those two roles. But there are Republican lawyers of stature who would be comfortable with the administration's legal philosophy (though also, we hope, able to moderate it) yet willing to stand up both to members of Congress and also to White House functionaries if they tried to intervene in particular prosecutions.
That would be essential, because the next attorney general would need to restore credibility that Gonzales so blithely squandered from the office. The new appointee should capitalize on Gonzales' downfall to tell Congress and Karl Rove to keep their distance from individual cases and make sure that invisible hands aren't adding prosecutors' names to hit lists.
Therein may lie the most important credentials for the next attorney general: He or she must be made of sterner -- and smarter -- stuff than Alberto gonzales.
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