More American Problems

Once again, this is a post that is is more than a month old at this posting. The issue here was that the writer who prompted this response was looking to minimize the gravity of the U.S. Attorney General's performance in the matter of deposed U.S. attorneys

All right, let’s look at this one more time. Four leading, experienced, distinguished, Senators of Attorney General Gonzales’ OWN PARTY – not Democrats, not Independents, not outliers, not grumps or wingnuts, and not even close to renegades — told him to take a walk.

Publicly! In front of the TV cameras! When they knew the whole country was watching!
They didn’t do it because they didn’t like the man’s hairstyle. And when they did it, they well knew that he was the president’s hand-picked choice for his position.

But even the nicest of them called the man “incompetent” and the rest were far less complimentary.

And now folks want to debate who is more sinner than sinned against?

Without deference and even without any apparent worry about the gravity of its own actions, the US Administration might as well have deliberately tried to marginalize and embarrass leading members of their own political party in the senior legislative house of the nation. It did so careless of how obviously it diminished these individuals, leaders in their own right, and did so, the more so, careless of its own deep seated institutional responsibility both to the other branches and to the intrinsic legal and semi-constitutional nature of the office of the Attorney-General.

The Attorney General of the United States, borrowing a bit from the British Commonwealth countries, is “the Chief Law Officer of the Republic.” I accept that the American constitutional system sees that officer having some policy control over the enforcement of the law and I accept that from time to time it seems prepared to take a risk that some administrations will want to read more politics into “policy” than the letters of the word allow. But at its roots, your Republic RELIES on this officer to enforce federal law. Not traffic tickets or unsightly premises by-laws but the essence of the legal operating system of the US federal government, the most powerful nation on earth, ever.

American Constitutional principle is founded on the ideal that there is to be accountability, that accountability of executive officers, where necessary, is to take place on an ongoing basis, that by convention if not by black letter law, the members of the country’s cabinet can be brought in, one thought, to respond to legitimate, democratic concerns in the houses of the legislature.
And American Senators have a constitutional blood line that goes back to the first days after the War of Independence to do this. For the sake of this discussion, forget about the Democratic ones, they can look after themselves.

The gents are far from turnips. For your democracy and others, one hopes that they are mad – or embarrassed – enough to demonstrate it.