Alberto out the door
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o far, it's difficult to ascertain who benefits most from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' resignation on Monday. Is it his persistent critics, or Americans' belief that government should be open, responsible and free of ethical stain?
We would argue that ours is not simply a rhetorical question. If it's only a victory for his critics, then the nation -- and our republic -- has been at the very least ill-served, and at most it may have been damaged. That is clearly President Bush's public assessment; he claims Gonzales endured "months of unfair treatment" and that his name has been "dragged through the mud for political reasons." The president, however, seems to have forgotten that Republicans as well as Democrats have been calling for Gonzales to leave.
But if the attorney general's resignation is a victory for those who sought to force out a man whose behavior sullied the reputation of the Justice Department and eroded public confidence in the nation's top law enforcement figure, then it's a good thing he was finally shoved off the plank.
At issue most recently was whether Gonzales had been involved in the firings -- allegedly for political reasons -- of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006. First he said he wasn't, then proof emerged that he was. Much more troubling is the lingering question of whether he committed perjury when testifying before Congress about details of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance programs.
But those were only the latest missteps during his tenure in the Bush administration. While still White House legal counsel, Gonzales had also been neck-deep in controversies, including his arguments that the president's powers should extend past constitutional limits and that our nation in the wake of the 9/11 attacks should abandon adherence to the Geneva Conventions; his opinions regarding "interrogation" methods of captured "enemy combatants" in the war on terror were seen by some as justification of torture.
That's why so many Republicans in Congress were just as happy as their Democratic colleagues to see Gonzales resign.
At this point, about the only downside we can see to the attorney general's resignation is that he did not offer it up months ago.
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