TPM: What's really at stake for Schumer in Confronting Gonzales

[antigop]

http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/specialguests/2007/apr/19/whats_really_at_stake_for_schumer_in_confronting_gonzales
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It would be all-too easy to cast New York senior Senator Charles Schumer’s grilling of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales today as the climax of a long-nursed, partisan grudge. Twenty-three years ago, during Ronald Reagan’s first term, the Republican U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York came within a millimeter of destroying Schumer with highly dubious criminal charges. None of the other indictment dodgers in Congress can be more sensitive to potential abuses of prosecutorial discretion and the Justice Department’s power to countenance or curb such abuses than Chuck Schumer, Gonzales’ chief inquisitor.

Now that I have your attention, let me complicate this a little. The masterminds of the long, unrelenting drive to indict Schumer (for deploying his New York State Assembly staffers in his first congressional campaign while paying them state salaries) were left-liberal Democrats and activist muckrakers hell-bent on nailing Schumer for purely personal, social, and ideological reasons. They tipped off and then collaborated closely with the zealous young U.S. Attorney Edward Korman (now a federal judge), whom they’d befriended and worked with for years. And it was the Reagan Justice Department that called off this witch hunt at the last minute.
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[On the Road]

1. What an Incredible Article!

The author writes from deep personal experience, some of which he regrets. It opens up the whole political/news/judicial process to an unbelievable degree.

The fact that his examples involve Democrat vs Democrat allows him to demonstrate the principles involved much more clearly than a partisan case would. And I learned a lot about Schumer.