http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/11/opinion/11mon2.htmlEditorial
A Test of the Senate Published: June 11, 2007
The Senate has scheduled a no-confidence vote today on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. No one who has followed the news needs to be told why it is necessary. Mr. Gonzales is the Michael Brown of the Justice Department, smilingly presiding over incompetence, chaos and malfeasance, while President Bush insists that he is doing a heck of a job. Today’s vote should get the support not only of Democrats, but of every Republican senator concerned about the American justice system.
The list of Mr. Gonzales’s misdeeds is long and serious. The Justice Department has enormous power to put people in jail, destroy reputations and affect the outcomes of elections. It must enforce the law impartially, but Mr. Gonzales has allowed political partisanship to drive his department.
He appointed underqualified, ethically challenged ideologues, and let them run amok. Monica Goodling, a former top Gonzales aide, admitted that she crossed the line — and most likely federal law — by hiring lawyers for nonpolitical jobs based on their politics. The purge of nine United States attorneys last year was also clearly politically motivated. Talented, respected prosecutors were fired because they didn’t do the Republican Party’s bidding.
Mr. Gonzales’s response has been shockingly deficient. He claimed that he was not in the loop on the firings. That would have been extreme dereliction of duty, since the fired attorneys were nearly 10 percent of his top state-level prosecutors. But it now seems clear that he was not telling the truth when he said it, which does not make him look any better.
The Justice Department is in shambles...
Senator Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat who pushed for today’s resolution, rightly says that if senators voted their conscience, it would be unanimous...
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