It Was You, Fredo

A few thoughts on the at-long-last end of a rags-to-fascism success story:

• One of the few contrarian arguments ever to turn out to be right was Yglesias’s qualified defense of John Ashcroft. The Bush administration has not only pursued poor-to-catastrophic policy outcomes, but is also frequently unable and/or unwilling to carry out the basic functions of government, adhere to the law, etc. Ashcroft was, at least, competent and unwilling to push the Bush administration’s lawlessness past a certain point. Gonzales failed utterly on all counts. And whether or not he was personally more moderate than Ashcroft, it certainly didn’t discernibly affect the policy agenda of his office. All that matters is whether you’re willing to carry out the administration’s dirtiest work, and he certainly was. Maybe this is the best way of summarizing Gonzales: he’s the man who could make you miss John Ashcroft.
• Evidently, Gonzales’s reign will be be most remembered by his further facilitating Yoo-generated theories of arbitrary executive power and his dissembling before Congress. But firing otherwise well-evaluated U.S. Attorneys because of their unwillingness to pursue bullshit “vote fraud” cases or for actually believing that Republicans should be subject for the law is also a definitive example of modern Republican governance.
• Even more scary: the GOP base considered Gonzales too moderate to be appointed to the Supreme Court, largely because he was willing to construe a law permitting minors to obtain judicial bypasses as actually permitting judicial bypasses to be issued, a conservative no-no. So he did get more lawless as time progressed. On another Republican-statist note, the one positive thing I can say about Michael Chertoff is that he’s mildly more civil libertarian than Bush’s most recent lifetime Supreme Court appointment. I’m pretty confident that his old-fashioned belief that the police actually need valid warrants before strip-searching people in their own homes will be abandoned if he’s willing to take the AG’s position, though.
• I’ll give the final word to Jack Balkin: “As for Mr. Gonzales, he was a disgrace to the office. There are many roles he could have competently filled– and did fill– in his career. The Nation’s chief law enforcement officer was not one of them. He abused his office for political gain, repeatedly misled Congress under oath –and probably out and out lied on more than one occasion– and turned a once proud institution of government into an object of deep suspicion.”

[Also at TAPPED.]