Letters to the Editor
Paul Rosenberg
Published Letters: 994 Editor's Choice: 16
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It's Only The Tip of the Iceberg
[Read the article: A light bulb goes off on the Washington Post editorial page]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Perhaps the Washington Post is catching up with the story just in time to try to contain it. I know how paranoid and conspiratorial this will sound to some. All I ask is an open mind to consider what may be at stake.
Late last month, I wrote a story for Random Lengths News "Above the Law: Three More Scandals as US Attorneys Story Unfolds," available online:
http://www.randomlengthsnews.com/archive/lawmarch23.html
that looked at the Cunnigham/Wade/Wilkes/Foggo scandal complex, the Abramoff Mariana's scandals, and the politicization of the DOJ to get Democrats via trumped-up prosecutions or voter suppression.
But now I think that even that story was just scratching the surface, given the Monica Goodling revelations--that an entire cadre of Pat Robertson's troops have been hired into the DoJ--and TPM's highlighting and commenting on the dual postings of six US Attorneys at DOJ Central, which was legalized under another provision in the Patriot Act revisions.
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/002976.php
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/013541.php
The combination of the two Patriot Act provisions now makes this whole thing seem both much deeper and much more deliberately planned. Running US Attorneys offices out of the DoJ central makes them much more supple instruments of presidential power, particularly if they can be replaced on a whim with no congressional involvement.
Imagine if Richard Nixon had had that sort of setup. That is to say, imagine if Sam Ervin were indicted in the early stages of the Watergate hearings.
I believe we are only beginning to grasp the seriousness of what BuchCo had planned with the DoJ. Two frames of reference to get us up to speed are Richard Reeves' book on the Nixon presidency, _Alone in the White House_, and Mark Tushnet's 2004 law review article "Constutional Hardball," recently discussed by Kargo X at DKos and The Next Hurrah.
Reeves paints a compelling portrait of Nixon as a man who wanted to reinvent the entire structure of government to centralize power in his hands, bypassing all the tradionally-established institutions, up to and including the political parties (he despised GOP leaders almost as much as Dems, and seriously toyed with the idea of starting a third party). This is the broader context for his already well-known collaboration with Henry Kissinger to circumvent both the Department of State and Defense in the making of foreign policy. Cheney and Rumsfeld were young staffers in this environment, elevated to the top under Ford after Nixon resigned.
Tushnet describes "constitutional hardball" thus:
It consists of political claims and practices – legislative and executive initiatives – that are without much question within the bounds of existing constitutional doctrine and practice but that are nonetheless in some tension with existing pre-constitutional understandings.3 It is hardball because its practitioners see themselves as playing for keeps in a special kind of way; they believe the stakes of the political controversy their actions provoke are quite high, and that their defeat and their opponents’ victory would be a serious, perhaps permanent setback to the political positions they hold.4
I think that How Would A Patriot Act shows rather definitively that Bush is willing to go rather well beyond "legislative and executive initiatives – that are without much question within the bounds of existing constitutional doctrine and practice," and hence Tushnet's formulation is one sense rather quaint.
Yet, if we combine Reeves's book for a sense of where this all began, Tushnet's article for a sense of the logic, and Glenn's book for a sense of how far that logic has already taken us beyond our constitutional order, then I think we have the proper perspective for looking at what lies beneath the surface of the DoJ firings. It is, at least arguably an attempt to turn the entire DoJ into a political instrument of the presidency, something quite in keeping with the notion of a "unitary executive," in which there are no institutional traditions, norms, practices or regulations that stand in the way of direct presidential orders to do this or that, simply because the president says so.
Combine this view of the executive branch as wholly subservient to one man's will, with Bush's signing statement docrtine, that the laws mean just what he says they mean, and nothing more, and we are dangerously close to the vey tyranny that our system of government was designed to prevent.
Naturally, it is politically infeasable for congressional Democrats to start off framing the scandal in such terms. But this is precisely where a truly thorough and rigorous line of investigation is very likely to lead. And what better way to prevent it than by a timely re-adjustment of conventional wisdom? It is, quite clearly, the job of the online community to raise such questions on our own, so that over time it becomes incumbent on others to raise them as well...and even, eventually, to answer them. Under oath.
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Igleasias re: Voter Fraud
[Read the article: A light bulb goes off on the Washington Post editorial page]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Jim asks:
did Iglesias say the charges of voter fraud were "without merit"? Or did he feel there may have been voter fraud but the evidence was not sufficiently probative to justify bringing charges? There's a big difference.
Iglesias set up a bipartisan group to look into allegations. They received leads on around 100 cases. The vast majority were without merit, leaving just a handful, according to press reports from in-state papers.
Of those, there was only one case that seemed prosecutable to him, but it was clear that the woman involved did the bogus registrations to get money for them, not to corrupt the election process, which is what the statute is all about. So Igleasias thought it was not worth pursuing. He confered with superiors at DoJ central, and was told to decided for himself, there was no imperative from above.
Having much better things to do, he declined to prosecute. It was quite evident that claims of widespread voter fraud--which is what the GOP has repeatedly alleged in states across the country--were without merit.