Alberto Gonzalez has no sense of Justice

Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez must resign.

He has attempted to fire eight federal prosecutors. This, in and of itself, is not a big deal. There is a huge staff of federal prosecutors and they serve at the pleasure of the President. Gonzales is the President's Attorney General, so these calls are largely up to him. The problem is that, as MSNBC.com points out, the Attorney General is no longer just the President's Lawyer. As the man who oversees the FBI, he is effectively the chief law enforcement officer for this country. He wields tremendous power over how crimes are prosecuted, and has a responsibility to do so fairly. But these were not fair exercises of power. The prosecutors have alleged that their firings were politically motivated. They were cleared out so that friends of Bush administration members, including Karl Rove, could be placed in powerful positions. Further, several of these prosecutors have reported that they were pressured by members of Congress to stop prosecutions that could affect friends of Republican members of Congress and the administration.

This alone would be unacceptable in a member of the administration, but additionally, it was recently revealed that the FBI has been overstepping and abusing its investigative powers granted by the PATRIOT Act. The FBI circumvented Department of Justice regulations in retrieving telephone billing records in several cases, bypassing the protections designed to prevent rampant abuse and unwarranted invasions of privacy in the name of security.

With his house in this much disorder, it is time for Mr. Gonzalez to go. He has influenced federal prosecutors to resign for political reasons. He has refused to act on reports from his own department accusing the FBI of malfeasance. He has failed to investigate possible pressure placed on prosecutors by Republican members of Congress. He has failed as a law enforcement officer.

I would like to believe that the President would get out ahead of this. I would like to believe that the President, as the guardian of the rights of the People in this country, would demand Mr. Gonzalez's resignation and appoint someone who will clean up the Justice Department and return the FBI to its proper status as the guarantors of civil rights and just law enforcement in this country.

...but he won't. This sad series of events only serves to illustrate the greater decay of our federal system under this administration. President Bush has allowed the reputation of the Justice Department as the protector of civil rights and of the people to fall into ruin. The legacy of the FBI under President Kennedy, as an organization that enforced civil rights for all Americans, has been replaced by a legacy of privacy violations; the Department of Justice is now an organization that pressures prosecutors for political ends. Our president has ruined the reputation that was built after World War II that America was the protector of human rights around the world; we are now known as thugs and imperialists. Domestic policy mirrors foreign policy. We should not be surprised by this.

The tree is rotten from the inside. If the entire tree cannot be removed, it is time to prune away the decaying limbs so that new life can be breathed into it by new gardeners.