Once again the Democrats did not rest until they brought ruination to a good man’s name and career. Alberto Gonzales resigned after months of pressure from Congress.
President Bush rebuked critics, saying, “His good name has been dragged through the mud for political reasons.”
This statement couldn’t be more true.
Ever since the beginning of Gonzales’ appointment, his office has been the center of controversy. Congressmen bent on obstructing Bush and his administration from doing the job he promised to do have attacked every effort Gonzales made to win the War on Terror.
There have been several “scandals” over the last two years, but the most recent is the most troubling and unfounded. The Attorney General came under fire for the dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys. The media and Congress smelled blood and knew this was their chance to finish him. The so-called “scandal” was that the firing of these U.S. attorneys was motivated by political reasons.
Unfortunately the American public is ignorant enough about the U.S. government to believe everything propagated by the media.
Congress decided they could gain attention by holding a hearing over these dismissals. They knew very well the hearings would never lead to anything, but wanted the chance to discredit the president further.
There were no criminal charges involved. There was nothing to defend.
The U.S. attorneys are selected by the president in power. All eight U.S. attorneys fired were appointed by Bush. Because they serve at his pleasure, they can also be dismissed at his displeasure. Gonzales submitted more than 3,000 pages of documents showing that no dismissal was based off improper reasons, but based on a department-wide performance evaluation.
It is routine for presidents to fire some or all U.S. attorneys during their term. In fact, by his second year, President Clinton had appointed 89 new U.S. attorneys out of the 93 jobs possible. And Congress and the media were worked up by eight being replaced?
The hypocrisy and bias displayed by the media and Democrat-led Congress is disgusting.
The Congress knew it could further tarnish President Bush’s image by holding these hearings. It knew President Bush would not release documents or force Justice Department workers to testify — which would make it look like he was hiding something or being unreasonable.
The truth — which some power-hungry congressmen and the media forget — is that there is something called the separation of powers.
Under the separation of powers, executive privilege exists. Executive privilege is the tradition of presidents refusing to appear before, or keeping presidential documents from, committees of Congress and the courts. It has existed since the time of George Washington.
In 1974, the Supreme Court supported the existence of executive privilege as being “fundamental to the operation of government and inextricably rooted in the separation of powers under the Constitution.”
There is no precedent that would take it away. Congress threatened that it would take this issue to court, but it wouldn’t want to risk it.
A court battle would result in either a Supreme Court ruling that substantially strengthened executive privilege so as to impair the power of Congress to oversee executive branch agencies, or a ruling that so weakened executive privilege that future presidents would suffer.
Either way they’d lose. If the Democrats got a president but lost the House, they wouldn’t want to lessen the president’s ability to do his job, and even more, they wouldn’t want a strong republican president to be able to overrule anything Congress did.
Gonzales, to this day, stands by the dismissals and the fact that all the hearings and controversies entertained were frivolous, unwarranted and shown to be unsubstantiated. The Democrats are doing everything they can to impede the president and discredit him so they will have a clear path to victory in ’08.
