Friday, July 08, 2005
SCOTUS Watch: LA Times gets it, on Gonzales
Too bad WaPo doesn't seem to. Oh well, they all go the same parties....
I would rather have an honest reactionary on the Court than a torture-enabling weasel like Gonzales; enabling torture—and destroying the rule of law into the bargain—is about as close to raw evil as it's possible to come.
NOTE I'm willing to give Reid a pass on saying Gonzales is acceptable; to me, that's a pretty good sign that it will never happen, because the wingers won't permit it. So, Reid can sound the note of sweet reason in complete safety.
add our vote to the chorus of social conservative groups clamoring against a possible nomination of Alberto R. Gonzales to the Supreme Court. Because of his central role in decisions taken by the administration to flout international law in pursuing the war on terrorism, Gonzales was a poor choice for the attorney general's office — as we stated earlier this year — and he would certainly be a disastrous choice for the Supreme Court.
As White House counsel, Gonzales, a longtime friend of President Bush, wrote a memo in early 2002 arguing that detainees in Afghanistan and in other war-on-terrorism theaters were not subject to Geneva Convention protections, which he shrugged off as "quaint."
Had he been a responsible counselor to his client, Gonzales would have urged Bush not to take the expedient shortcuts that led to the scandals at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, and the unlawful detention of U.S. citizens denied access to counsel.
Even Justice Antonin Scalia, among the most conservative of jurists, was outraged by the White House's assertion, built on Gonzales' advice, that the executive branch could suspend the rule of law to fight terrorism. "The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been the freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the executive branch," wrote Scalia.
But where are the liberal advocates and Democratic senators who opposed Gonzales' nomination as attorney general? Is a torture-supporting nominee to the court really an acceptable lesser-of-evils these days?
(via LA Times)
I would rather have an honest reactionary on the Court than a torture-enabling weasel like Gonzales; enabling torture—and destroying the rule of law into the bargain—is about as close to raw evil as it's possible to come.
NOTE I'm willing to give Reid a pass on saying Gonzales is acceptable; to me, that's a pretty good sign that it will never happen, because the wingers won't permit it. So, Reid can sound the note of sweet reason in complete safety.
