A Fundamental Breach of Ethics

Last week was a great time for those of us who've been waiting for Alberto Gonzales to be revealed as what he really is: a fatally underqualified yes-man who should never have been placed at the helm of the Justice Department. On the other hand, it was a terrible time for anyone who understands how important the Department of Justice is to what remains of justice in the American experiment.

We should remember, as we think about the AG's substandard performance in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, that we might never have known the depth of his dishonesty (he is apparently able to recall having made a decision without being able to recall when), his lack of curiosity (he admitted that he didn't review the performance reports on some of his highest-profile subordinates prior to their dismissal), and his rank incompetence, if the Democrats hadn't reversed the Republican congressional majority in the recent midterm elections.

Friday night on Real Time with Bill Maher, Republican political analyst Amy Holmes repeated the talking point that the US Attorneys scandal is not that big a deal; that it's a made-up, inside-the-Beltway scandal; that it wasn't the firings that were improper, but the way in which they were handled. Like a lot of other information coming from the administration, nothing could be further from the truth. It's possible to act unethically without breaking the law.

Without falling into the trap of moral equivalency, I think we can agree that President Clinton would have been guilty of unethical behavior even if he hadn't tried to conceal his extramarital affair, and even if it hadn't been with someone under his authority; in other words, even if he hadn't been accused of breaking any laws. We vest a tremendous amount of power in our political leaders, and we should expect a very high standard of behavior from them in return.

So never mind that US Attorneys serve "at the pleasure of the President"; it is a fundamental breach of ethics for an AG to dismiss any US Attorney who is investigating members of his own political party -- as several of the fired attorneys were -- unless their performance is so egregious that keeping them on them would do obvious harm to the continued functioning of the Justice Department. It's a matter of public record that for the majority of USAs who were fired, their performance was not in question; on the contrary, prior to being dismissed they had received positive evaluations from within the Department.

Any Republican AG with a shred of ethics would have understood that, once a USA is investigating or seeking indictments of Republican politicians, he or she cannot be touched. There would have been just as big an outcry -- and justifiably so -- if Janet Reno had been a lifelong friend of President Clinton (in reality he was none too fond of her) and, amid talk of who was and was not a "loyal Clintonite", had summarily dismissed high-performing US Attorneys who just happened to be investigating a slew of high-profile Democrats.

Any president whose ethics were intact would understand the magnitude of this breach and the damage it is doing to the image of the Justice Department both here and abroad, not to mention the morale of the remaining US Attorneys on Gonzales' staff. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), speaking to reporters during a break in Gonzales' testimony, compared George Bush to previous Republican presidents, remarking that "after today there'd be no question that Alberto Gonzales would not be attorney general, and that's the difference".

Another difference is that -- to quote another often-used Republican talking point -- we're in the middle of a war. Not just any war either. According to the Bush administration, it's one in which ideas are just as important as more tangible weapons; we're attempting to export democracy to parts of the world which have rarely if ever known it. Regardless of the wisdom of trying to remake Iraq as a Jeffersonian democracy, that is our stated objective; so if cronyism, confessional government, and prosecutorial loyalty to people, rather than to the rule of law, are wrong there, they're wrong here as well.

Here's a talking point for the left: if President Bush truly supports the democratic ideals for which we're fighting, he should act with the courage of his convictions and dismiss any official whose conduct violates those ideals, starting with the Attorney General. It ought to go without saying that America should be the model we seek to replicate elsewhere in the world.

Of course there's no danger of Bush acting on such advice. What would happen if he did so consistently is known as a purge.

Purge. Let's remember that word in 2008.