As right-wing religious leaders attack Alberto Gonzales for being
insufficiently doctrinaire, it's tempting to accept him as the best we can
get for the Supreme Court. In a recent HuffingtonPost blog, Rob McKay
suggested we mute our opposition voices precisely because a Gonzales
nomination would divide the political right and fracture their coalition.
But accepting someone with the track record and values of Gonzales would be
a grievous mistake. We're in our current mess in large part because our
culture has been unable to confront the profoundly destructive consequences
of the choices made by our leaders. To equivocate about Gonzales's role in
these choices is to accept a culture of lies.
Of course, we don't completely control the outcome in this fight. It depends
on the Democrats showing enough spine and the half-dozen supposedly moderate
Republicans placing democracy ahead of short-term partisan advantage, and
refusing to eliminate the judicial filibuster. But when someone exhibits as
much contempt for due process as Gonzales does, we have to challenge him, in
every way we can.
Gonzales is not David Souter, a relative unknown. He's someone who's
embraced the most radical extensions of presidential power and most radical
contempt for human rights. He called the Geneva Conventions "quaint" and
"obsolete." He chaired the 2002 meetings that that argued that
interrogations were not torture unless they produced "injury such as death,
organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions." He wrote the
Presidential Order saying that terror suspects could be tried and sentenced
to death by secret military tribunals.
Gonzales has also been consistently promoted questionable corporate
interests. While on the Texas Supreme Court, he accepted major donations
from corporations, like Halliburton, with cases before the court
(Halliburton had five separate cases). Then he consistently supported the
positions of these companies while refusing to recuse himself. He similarly
refused to recuse himself from the Bush administration's investigation of
the Enron scandal, though he'd received $14,000 from the company of "Kenny
Boy." When the Government Accountability Office asked who participated in
Dick Cheney's secret energy policy meetings, Gonzales blocked release of the
documents.
Maybe a Gonzales nomination would temporarily split the right. But he isn't
someone to embrace, either morally or politically. And if we let his
potential nomination go through without a fight, Bush can still heal the
wounds in his coalition by nominating a "real" conservative to William
Rehnquist's seat. Meanwhile we'll have raised the bar still further till
we're unable to challenge anyone short of Attila the Hun or Vlad the
Impaler, and then only if they've spoken too bluntly.
We may not win in challenging Gonzales, but at least we will make clear why
giving him a lifetime appointment is an outrage to democracy. We can
highlight the profound destructiveness of the values that he and this
administration represent. We can challenge the Republican "moderates" to
stay true to their word and maintain the option of the judicial filibuster.
If we do this successfully, we'll help define Bush's Republicans not just as
captives to some vague notion of extremism, but to specific policies that
assault our democracy, endanger the lives of its citizens, and plunder the
planet that we inhabit. If swing Republicans still vote to eliminate the
filibuster, or insist on the confirmation of Gonzales, we can and should
hang this action around their necks, and brand them, come election time, not
only for embracing legal torture and unalloyed giveaways to corporate
interests, but also for annihilating 200 years of democratic checks and
balances in the service of a raw power grab.
Those on the political right have split and reunited too often for us to
count on their rupture over even something as consequential as a Supreme
Court nomination. When election time comes, they'll cut their losses and
work together to elect those who will give them the maximum power. Learning
from this means not giving up on challenging reprehensible nominees before
we start.
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Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A
Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, winner of the Nautilus Award for
best social change book of last year. He's also the author of Soul of a
Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time and three other books.
See
http://www.theimpossible.org for more on Paul's work.
