The Senate’s planned no-confidence vote in Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Wednesday won’t, even if successful, have any legal meaning.
But the embattled head of the Department of Justice will suffer even further damage to something he desperately needs: credibility.
The decision last week by Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar to call for Gonzales’ resignation is emblematic of the continued erosion of Gonzales’ viability.
Salazar has been one of Gonzales’ few Democratic friends in Congress. At Gonzales’ 2005 Senate confirmation hearing, Salazar was at his side to endorse the appointment of the former Texas judge.
But a series of revelations about how the department has become politicized led Salazar to say that the Department of Justice was “beginning to smell.”
Indeed, it has. Bit by bit, it has been revealed that the department is a place where young, Republican Party operatives engineered the firings of U.S. attorneys who didn’t stick to the play book.
E-mails and other evidence suggests they singled out prosecutors who went after prominent Republicans, and punished those who refused to build cases against Democrats. Some U.S. attorneys were fired to make way for more loyal figures.
At the Justice Department’s annual U.S. attorneys conference in San Antonio last week, Gonzales tried to rally the troops. But he was met with a group of prosecutors who were angry about what the department had become and how their fired colleagues had been treated, according to a Washington Post story.
The administration is standing firm in supporting Gonzales and seems to be holding on to hope that the scandal will blow over. On Monday, President Bush called the upcoming Senate vote of no confidence in Gonzales “pure political theater.”
That might be the case if support for Gonzales broke strictly along party lines. But, along with a host of Democrats, five Republicans have urged Gonzales to resign, and several others have criticized him. U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., is among those who are concerned about Gonzales’ leadership.
Federal prosecutors cannot operate without public respect and an unwavering belief that their pursuit of justice is above any political objective. Gonzales’ tenure at the helm of the Justice Department has been a debacle, and it is rapidly undercutting the effectiveness of this important arm of government.
