The real reasons for Gonzales to go/AG's willingness to expand executive power

[jbfam4]

, March 20, 2007
Today's editorial: The real reasons for Gonzales to go
AG's willingness to expand executive power is more troubling than mishandling of firings
http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/opinion/abox/article_1624519.php



Before becoming attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, who had been George W. Bush's personal lawyer and held a number of positions in Texas, was White House counsel. As such he played an integral role in formulating administration policy on coercive interrogations. He was influential in advising that the Geneva Conventions on treatment of prisoners of war did not apply to al-Qaida members and to those detained at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, and he was active in seeking legal authority for harsh interrogation tactics that the intelligence community found troubling and that went beyond the tactics enshrined in longstanding military directives.

In addition, he was an active promoter of the program of warrantless surveillance of U.S. residents (presumably in contact with foreigners suspected of having connections to terrorist organizations) that seems to violate the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. And it was on his watch that the FBI mishandled a troubling number of National Security Letters that authorize surveillance without judicial oversight.

The extent to which these actions presume that the president's wartime powers are so expansive that they may override existing law and longstanding moral scruples is highlighted in the 2002 Bybee memorandum which Mr. Gonzales and White House counsel requested from the Office of Legal Counsel. That memorandum suggested that existing U.S. laws outlawing torture might be unconstitutional if they encroached on the president's power to conduct a military campaign. This kind of reasoning flew in the face of Supreme Court precedent – that the president's power is at its minimum when Congress has legislated on a subject – and was repudiated by the U.S. Supreme Court in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, where the court made clear that a state of war does not give the president a blank check.


Alberto Gonzales has consistently sought to enhance executive power, pushing it into questionable realms like near-torture and wiretapping Americans without a warrant, in service to a view of presidential wartime power that is almost absolute. To be sure, he has apparently done this at the behest of the president he serves. But executive overreaching has engendered the kind of backlash America's founders, who hoped different branches of government would check overreaching by other branches, anticipated, making Mr. Gonzales's position politically as well as philosophically untenable.

It is time for him to go.

[pnwmom]

1. The firings were the latest example of the drive to expand executive power.

They aren't a separate issue.

Since the Patriot Act had been changed to allow Bush to name their replacements without ever getting Senate confirmation, this was a major expansion of Executive power.