This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2007, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Nothing would become the legacy of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales more than his departure.
For that is all that is left for the disgraced former White House counsel, who never really set aside that legal/political role after President Bush named Gonzales to head the Justice Department.
At his swearing in, Gonzales said that while he would be part of the president's Cabinet "team," the AG "represents, also, the American people, and his first allegiance must always be to the Constitution of the United States."
It is increasingly clear that the only role Gonzales has ever performed well has been as a yes-man on Bush's team, from working up bogus legal rationales for torture, suspension of habeas corpus for anyone suspected of terrorism and illegal electronic eavesdropping on Americans, to the firing of U.S.
attorneys for political reasons at the direction of the White House.
So discredited has Gonzales become since Congress began looking into the firings of eight U.S. attorneys that the Senate plans to take a no-confidence vote that, while non-binding, will tell the White House that only Gonzales' departure will satisfy.
Five Republican senators have urged Gonzales to resign, and even Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, a zealous Bush supporter, said of a possible resignation, "When you have to spend more time up here on Capitol Hill instead of running the Justice Department, maybe you ought to think about it."
Bush, of course, has consistently defended "my dear friend." But that may change as examination of Gonzales' past actions focus on the level of Bush's involvement. Last week, for example, the president twice refused to answer say whether he had, in March 2004, ordered Gonzales and White House chief of staff Andrew Card Jr. to press ailing Attorney General John Ashcroft to sign a reauthorization of the secret domestic eavesdropping program.
As related to the Senate Judiciary Committee by former deputy attorney general James Comey, Ashcroft, though extremely ill and in intensive care, told Card and Gonzales point blank that he would not sign the order because the Justice Department considered the program illegal.
The president should tell his good friend Al that the jig is up and that he should resign. He knows Gonzales will do whatever he asks, and so, sadly, do we.