Talking to Americans, Part III: Why Non Confidence is a Tool that American Legislators Should Use

TThe failure of the United States Senate to pass a motion of non-confidence in the US Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, yesterday was in large measure successful when Republican Party officials were able to smirch (?) the vote as being illegitimate-- the grounds being that governmental no-confidence is a parliamentary and not an American model technique.The idea behind this post is that it is a tool that properly can and should be added to the tools available to American legislators seeking to constrain an administration inclined to run amuck.

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During times when not just the President’s one-time counsel, but when the entire administration of the whole American Department of Justice, has elected to say and do, not what sought be done but what the “client” wants to hear, with deeply troubling constitutional consequences, I would have thought that the use of any legal or political legislative technique which might help to shore up the rule of the law would have been legitimate.

So...perhaps one might step more lightly on “across the pond” implication that allowed weak spirited legislators a cheap and convenient escape hatch from a vote of confidence that pitted principle against partisan convenience.

What has happened to the administration of American federal justice through this era of least the Gonzales era, is that through this time the Attorney General has persistently been brought to legislative account and has consistently failed, is an offence of constitutional process in a government that is supposed to be one of laws.

The motion of non-confidence in the Attorney-General ought to welcomed as another, precise and useful tool in the perpetual intellectual balancing act inherent in American republican government. It is not as though recent experience in the affairs of the administration of the republic, the facile and limp wristed responses to administration policies of civilian surveillance, of reasonable process in the arraignment and trial of suspected terrorists, the treatment of domestic suspected terrorist, straight forwardness in the characterization of military-legal affairs, to name a few, accurate suggest that the armamentarium available is exactly overflowing.

Think about this. The parliamentary system does not have a lock on the idea of non-confidence. It is no small constitutional or legal event when the senior legislative body in the US republic has seriously entertained a motion of non-confidence in a senior-most officer of the United States, has done so with the support of members of both political parties and when others of the governing party have escaped only by claiming that the instrument is foreign or, more to the point in the unspoken sub-text, British.

Non-confidence is a technique which American legislators ought to keep close at hand, and use frequently as required, with others, in recording and underlining the exercise of the clearly imposed constitutional duty: we are doing no favour to the legitimate administration of the law in any nation to play into the political hands of partisans who try to diminish the tool not on the grounds of its clear and obvious value, but on the cynical and false measurement of where it might have come from.