The Supreme connection?
Posted by Thomas Nephew on March 30th, 2007
It’s not for lack of interest that I’ve not written much about the AttorneyGate (Purgegate, US Attorney Abuse, call it what you will) scandal until now. It’s mainly because I can barely keep up with developments, and didn’t have legal expertise or other contributions to bring to the discussion.
But — unlike so many of Bush’s and Gonzales’ gophers these days — I can remember stuff. And with so much attention understandably focused on Attorney General Gonzales and Boy Wonder Karl Rove, it seems to me another key player in the story (besides Bush himself, of course) is getting unfairly overlooked — Harriet Miers, the President’s former legal counsel.
Harriet Miers’ fingerprints are all over the firings of eight US attorneys for their too-vigorous prosecutions of Republicans and/or their refusals to prosecute Democrats for bogus “voter fraud” cases. Yesterday, one of the few things that Gonzales ex-staffer Kyle Sampson was able to remember was
SAMPSON: Well, Judicial Selection Committee meetings happen regularly, approximately once a week; maybe something less than that. It would be canceled from time to time. And the issue of U.S. attorney replacements was quite episodic, you know, in the thinking phase of this through 2005 and 2006. And it would just come up occasionally after a Judicial Selection meeting, usually between myself and Harriet Miers and Bill Kelley.
And one thing I remember about Harriet Miers is that — for one brief and shining moment in the fall of 2005 — she was about to be a Supreme Court justice. At the time, it seemed like a combination of underwhelming ability and insufficient conservative bona fides eventually scuttled the nomination; the question left unanswered was why Bush had ever chosen Miers in the first place.
That question now has yet another interesting possible answer. While it was always thought likely that Miers would be “in the bag” for any cases involving Bush’s myriad other crimes — torture, illegal surveillance, what have you — there was less talk (that I recall, anyway) about stuff with Miers’ own fingerprints on it. Like AttorneyGate, where Miers’ correspondence with Sampson about firing US Attorneys began in February 2005, well before her nomination on October 3, 2005.
And indeed, the Miers nomination fiasco foreshadowed today’s in one particularly revealing way; when President Bush “reluctantly accepted” Miers’ request to step aside as nominee on October 27, 2005, he also said that the Senate’s interest in internal White House documents “would undermine a president’s ability to receive candid counsel.”
A couple of things stand out to me about the AttorneyGate story thus far:
- The Bush people spent a whole lot of time and effort on it;
- It was so important to them — and they were so sure they could do it — that, as Harold Meyerson pointed out, they went ahead with plans even after getting destroyed at the polls last November, all but guaranteeing them Congressional hearings on the subject.
Now it’s possible you could chalk up some of this to hubris and/or stupidity, like so much else with the Bushies. But maybe they felt like they had an ace up their sleeve — just the way this whole operation may have been what made Dubya so very sure he’d win in the runup to last November’s elections (and so publicly ticked off at Rove when he got his clock cleaned instead).
And Harriet Miers isn’t the only person who could shed light on just how far the Rove/Bush plan went… or still goes. After all, it took only four days to anoint her successor — and Justice Samuel Alito is well known for his enthusiasms for the unitary executive, signing statements, and unchecked, expanded presidential power generally. Plan B was oiled and ready.
If Harriet Miers ever appears before the Senate and/or House Judiciary Committees under oath, she may get asked questions like these:
- “Did you ever discuss the propriety, legality, or constitutionality of firing prosecutors for being too nonpartisan?”
- “Did you ever discuss the propriety, legality, or constitutionality of using the Justice Department for partisan political purposes, such as vote suppression in national elections?”
- “Did you ever discuss whether you believed executive privilege would apply to evidence of plans to do either of these things?”
- “Did you ever agree to rule in favor of the Bush administration should such issues come before you in the Supreme Court?”
Point being, the same questions might be usefully put to Justices Alito and Roberts.
Now this may seem like overreach, it may even seem irresponsible. But time and again, as Josh Marshall has observed, the safest conclusion about any given scandal in the Bush era has turned out to be that it would go much, much further than anyone believed it would. In which case, to echo Peggy Noonan’s famous line:
“Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.”
Admittedly, of course, this isn’t about anything as serious as a blow job, it’s just about suborning the legal machinery of the United States for partisan political gain.
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NOTES: “unlike” — Steve Benen, “Carpetbagger Report”; “so many” — Howard Kurtz, Washington Post, 3/30/07; “Gonzales’ gophers” — “Taking One for the Team, When He Could Remember”, Dana Milbank, Washington Post, 3/30/07; “Yesterday” — Senate Judiciary hearing transcript, 3/29/07, via Washington Post; “would undermine” — “President’s Statement on Harriet Miers’ Supreme Court Nomination Withdrawal,” 10/27/05, White House web site; “a whole lot of time” — TPM USA Attorney scandal timeline; “Harold Meyerson” — “The Republican Mystery,” Washington Post, 3/28/07; “so very sure” — digby (”Hullabaloo”): “Naht guh happen”, 9/9/06; “unitary executive” etc. — this blog, “Dear Senate Democrats: filibuster Alito”, 1/26/06; “vote suppression” — “Bush’s long history of tilting Justice,” Joseph Rich (former DoJ lawyer), LA Times, 3/29/07, via Paul Kiel (TPM Muckraker).
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March 31st, 2007 at 4:16 am
These clowns have made the image of a president having extramarital oral sex in the Oval Office wholesome.
March 31st, 2007 at 5:16 am
Yeah, now that we’ve got casual lawbreakers and flat out war criminals running the show, that all seems so quaint — old-fashioned even! Like watching Mayberry RFD reruns or something. Remember that little whistling tune that show had?