The Cherry Orchard

So Alberto Gonzales has resigned. Are Americans satisfied? Hell no. As has been remarked earlier in these pages, we always suspected that the White House was keeping the embattled Attorney General in office not to promote the work this Attorney General could do, but as a bulwark against the work a new Attorney General could do (and will have to do) in furthering investigations that could harm the Bush/Cheney administration.

This has always seemed the obvious explanation for Gonzales’s stubborn refusal to resign, and I still find it amazing when news outlets would report that “George Bush is standing by Gonzales” and discuss “Bush’s loyalty” in keeping Gonzales in office. Since the Attorney General was having a rough ride of historic proportions in the press and on Capitol Hill, it’s impossible to imagine that Gonzales wanted to stay in office. Clearly, it was Gonzales who was standing by Bush, and not the other way around.

It’s also obvious that the White House was calling the shots on how long Alberto Gonzales would stay and when he would resign. It’s all about strategy, and this latest move is just another play in the long, sad game known as the George W. Bush presidency. Next up, the US Senate will reconvene, and I trust they’re planning to keep turning up the heat.

In yesterday’s Rose Garden speech (aptly covered by Crooks and Liars) President Bush answered questions about the incredible Alberto Gonzales scandal by asking America to be satisfied with a closed-door “internal investigation” that the Justice Department is apparently conducting. Why on earth should we be satisfied with an internal investigation when so much evidence has already been revealed in Congress?

I never intended this blog to turn into “the Gonzales watch”, but my instincts tell me this big story is going to keep getting bigger. If the President continues to hold the position that there has been no significant wrongdoing at the Department of Justice despite the absolutely gigantic amount of evidence to the contrary, Congress needs to respond by examining this misstep as grounds for impeachment.

Monica Goodling, Alberto Gonzales’s last loyal holdout, has now testified that she broke the law in asking job applicants political questions and making hiring decisions on that basis, but “I didn’t mean to”.

Ms. Goodling, whose prim and pained demeanor is reminiscent of “Angela” on The Office, also testified that Gonzales has given false testimony about the current scandal, and that he has engaged in conversations with her about the current scandal that seem to cross the line into witness-tampering.

Why is Alberto Gonzales still the United States Attorney General?

I try to keep it fresh here at the Orchard, but sometimes I have to dredge up a story of my own from a few weeks earlier, just because it is my self-appointed role to ask the more established members of our journalistic community to do a better job at reporting the news, and everybody — EVERYBODY — seems to be missing the obvious subtext of the weird showdown taking place in Washington DC right now between the executive and legislative branches over Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

So, Take Two. As I said before. To repeat myself. THE ALBERTO GONZALES AFFAIR IS NOT JUST ANOTHER SCANDAL, and THIS IS NOT BUSINESS AS USUAL. Disgraced government officials come and go, and it’s not shattering news when a key member of any US president’s cabinet gets into trouble. But it is shattering news when:

1) that US president is facing intensive investigations of his conduct in office and is stonewalling key pieces of information relevant to these investigations.

2) the disgraced government official is the Attorney General, with vast power to influence (or impede) the progress of criminal and civil investigations involving the White House.

3) this disgraced government official refuses to resign against an absolute barrage of damning testimony and evidence against him, including (now) a highly unusual congressional vote of “no confidence” against him.

One plus one plus one equals three. And it is as clear as glass that the reason Alberto Gonzales is refusing (against all rational advice from both Republicans and Democrats) to resign is that the Bush administration is terrified of what a less sympathetic Attorney General could investigate.

I said it before, and I cannot be the only American doing the math here. Why do the major news outlets not explain this equation to the American people? I truly don’t understand.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is all over the news this week, following his unconvincing Senate testimony last week (here’s one of the stories going around, and there was a lot of hilarity after President Bush claimed that Gonzales’s testimony helped his case). Still, I have a strange sense that most news outlets aren’t communicating exactly why this is such a high-stakes situation for the Bush administration and for the House/Senate leadership, and why the Bush administration is clinging so stubbornly to the hope that Gonzales will not be eventually forced to resign. There’s a hidden story here, and most Washington DC journalists know it and hint about it, but for some reason few journalists are coming right out and explaining what’s going on in this case.

The fact is, Gonzales is not just another high-ranking Bush appointee. He’s the Attorney General, which means he has the authority to investigate and prosecute anyone suspected of committing a federal crime, including top administration officials up to the level of the President’s top staff, thus encircling the President himself. As a longtime friend of George W. Bush and a key member of the Bush/Cheney team, Alberto Gonzales is not going to prosecute anybody close to the Bush administration for any number of wrongdoings. A different Attorney General, however, might.

Even though the Attorney General is a Presidential appointee, the appointee must be approved by the Senate, and our current Senate is not going to approve a candidate who does not demonstrate a basic willingness to investigate the Executive office independently of Presidential influence. So, if Gonzales were to resign, an extremely contentious nomination/approval process would begin for his replacement, and since this nation cannot survive long without leadership in the Department of Justice, some compromise candidate would have to eventually be approved. This new Attorney General could prove very hazardous for the Bush White House as our Congress and Senate continue to conduct aggressive investigations into the workings of the Executive office.

This is what’s at the core of the Alberto Gonzales showdown: our government is somewhere near a state of constituional crisis, similar to the constitutional crisis of 1973-74. Remember Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre? This was one of the most critical turning points of the Watergate scandal, and it all revolved around the Attorney General’s office.

I’m not sure why so many journalists aren’t stating this clearly to the American people, but the Alberto Gonzales case is all about the viability of the Bush/Cheney administration. And I don’t believe it for a minute when Gonzales says he’s made his own choice not to resign. He’s not resigning because George W. Bush is begging him not to, and I bet he’d zoom out of Washington DC like a rocket if Bush let go of his arm. Gonzales has nothing to gain and nothing to lose at this point, but George W. Bush needs him sitting in that chair.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is almost definitely going to resign. Yay. One more liar down.

I don’t usually gaze into crystal balls, but here’s a rare Cherry Orchard political prediction just for the fun of it. Dick Cheney will resign the Vice-Presidency “for health reasons” by mid-summer. Condoleeza Rice will replace him, in an attempted “sacrifice fly” by the White House administration. Whether the sac succeeds or not, time will tell.

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