Why Alberto Gonzales Must Resign

^{Full Coverage: Civil Liberties in the War on Terror}

President Bush shakes hands with the man he affectionately refers to as mi abogado ("my attorney"), U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Image courtesy of the White House.

On Sunday, the New York Times called for the resignation of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. I concur.

There are three primary reasons why Attorney General Gonzales should resign, and any one of them would be adequate grounds.

1. He presided over the politically-motivated firings of eight U.S. attorneys.

In hearings conducted last week, it became clear that federal prosecutors investigating corruption during the 2006 election season were intimidated, and in at least eight cases fired, due to their refusal to organize their investigations around the political needs of Republican candidates.

Look at the account of David Iglesias, for example. As The New York Times reported last Thursday:

David Iglesias, who was removed as the United States attorney in Albuquerque, said that he was first contacted before last fall’s election by Representative Heather Wilson, Republican of New Mexico. Ms. Wilson, who was in a tough re-election fight, asked about sealed indictments — criminal charges that are not public.

Two weeks later, he said, he got a call from Senator Pete Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, asking whether he intended to indict Democrats before the election in a high-profile corruption case. When Mr. Iglesias said no, he said, Mr. Domenici replied that he was very sorry to hear it, and the line went dead. Mr. Iglesias said he’d felt “sick.” Within six weeks, he was fired. Ms. Wilson and Mr. Domenici both deny that they had tried to exert pressure.

If eight seems like a low number, given the level of corruption in Washington, consider also that the federal prosecutors who did bow to political pressure, and remained employed as a result, are unlikely to commit career suicide by going public with their stories.

2. The national security letters fiasco.

I don't know if the FBI's abuse of the PATRIOT Act was intentional or not. I don't know if it was Mueller's fault or not. I do know that if Attorney General Gonzales allowed mistakes of his magnitude to be made under his watch, his management of the Justice Department has been at best incompetent and at worst criminal. Whether he actively ordered thousands of improper warrantless searches or was simply oblivious to what was going on in his own department, he is clearly not the person we want overseeing our entire criminal justice apparatus in the post-9/11 world.

3. Intimidation of minority voters.

It may sound strange to accuse our first non-white attorney general of imposing a white racist agenda, but how else can you explain the behavior of a justice department official who supports initiatives written specifically to reduce non-white voter turnout, who ignores urban waiting time disparities that have an almost ubiquitously deleterious effect on non-white voter turnout (where one can wait up to seven hours in a black precinct, but finish up in five minutes in a white precinct a few miles away), but who still has time to harass black candidates over white voter turnout? As Perrspectives explained last May:

[T]he Bush administration once again appears to be standing the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on its head ... [T]he Justice Department is bringing action against Ike Brown, the African-American head of the Democratic Party in sparsely populated Noxubee County [in Mississippi]. Brown, the suit contends, used coercion and intimidation to prevent the white voters, who make up only 30% of the county, from going to the polls.

This is ... [not] to deny the possibility of voter suppression by entrenched African-American political machines ... [But the Bush administration] has not brought a suit on behalf of disenfranchised black voters since 2001. Far from backing African-American claims of voter suppression and intimidation, Alberto Gonzales has spurned enforcement of the Voting Rights Act in Mississippi, Texas, and Georgia ...

Gonzales overruled a review team of his own Civil Rights Division, which voted 4-1 not to grant Georgia's new ID card law the "pre-clearance" required by the DOJ under the Voting Rights Act. Ultimately, a U.S. District Court last October blocked the law passed by Georgia Republicans to smother black voter turnout. Eventually, the Georgia legislature approved and Governor Sonny Perdue signed a revised voter ID law.

President Bush would have never won the 2000 election were it not for minority voter intimidation in Florida, so it would probably be unrealistic to expect him to champion the rights of minority voters. But this wasn't President Bush's call; this was Attorney General Gonzales'. The views of his own civil rights division, and his own knowledge of civil rights law, should have trumped political considerations. When he decided to actively participate in the suppression of minority voter turnout, Attorney General Gonzales made common cause with the Constitution's enemies and did irreparable harm to his legacy.

For the good of his administration, his party, and the country as a whole, Alberto Gonzales must resign.

See also:

• Civil Liberties in the War on Terror