Monday’s U.S. Senate session offered a political preview of 2008 and the result was petty, not pretty.
New York Sen. Charles Schumer, who is chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, put on a show of partisan politics that will not soon be topped.
Schumer is the prime sponsor of an unprecedented resolution that claims the U.S. Senate and “the American public” have lost confidence in Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
As an initial matter, the Senate doesn’t pick Cabinet officers. In parliamentary systems, legislators have the option of declaring confidence or no confidence in a sitting government, but that has never been the practice here. Certainly there were no similar resolutions considered when Janet Reno attracted public criticism as attorney general during the Clinton administration.
Beyond those considerations, however, there is ample evidence that Schumer’s resolution is wrong when it comes to assessing Gonzales’ support in either the Senate or the general public. Schumer fell seven votes short of the necessary 60 votes to bring the resolution to a final Senate vote. And recent public opinion polls show that if the American people have lost confidence in anybody, it is in Congress. One poll cited in the Senate debate shows that only 19 percent of those asked approve of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. The favorable rating for Congress is not much higher. Gonzales, by contrast, gets approval numbers twice as high as Reid.
The Senate resolution did produce some remarkable moments, some of them casting a needed spotlight on Schumer himself.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., delivered what sounded like a personal attack on Schumer and his apparent conflict of interest. McConnell recalled that when Schumer ran for the Senate in 1998 and defeated Alfonse D’Amato, he claimed that D’Amato had used his official capacity in 1996 to wage a political war on then-First Lady Hillary Clinton. At the time, D’Amato was a co-chair of a committee to elect Bob Dole president. McConnell essentially said that Schumer is now doing exactly what he accused D’Amato of doing: mixing up his official acts with his role on the campaign committee.
Incredibly, when Schumer took the floor moments later, he completely ignored McConnell’s comments and made no effort to defend his recent actions. Instead, when Schumer finished his remarks, Majority Leader Reid rose right on cue to defend him. Reid didn’t address the conflict-of-interest charge directly, but instead said that Schumer has the largest intellectual capacity of anyone he has ever known.
This is hyperbole on an Olympic scale, but Schumer himself is a master of the craft. During his remarks condemning Gonzales as everything but an official enemy of the state, Schumer grandly announced that there was “virtually no one” in the United States who had confidence in Gonzales, and proclaimed that his continued tenure in the office posed a threat to “the rule of law.”
Caught up in the excitement, California’s senior Democrat, Dianne Feinstein, delivered a fevered indictment of the attorney general, but part of her pitch was that Gonzales had taken views on a number of things, including the Patriot Act, which differed from her own. To put it charitably, it is hard to understand why an attorney general should be forced from office simply because he disagrees on a matter of policy with a U.S. senator.
But when you get down to it, there has always been a political element to the selection of the attorney general. President John F. Kennedy appointed his brother Robert to be attorney general, and there is no historical record that Democrats were complaining then that he might be influenced by the political views of his boss.
During those years, by the way, the FBI (under J. Edgar Hoover) did a number of things that were motivated by nothing if not politics.
There are two ways to look at this unhappy chapter in Senate history. One is that it isn’t likely to be repeated. The other is that the political motives behind it will simply find new outlets and new targets.
It is a nasty season – and there is no better gauge of political venom than Schumer’s own website, It provides a bitter preview of what is yet to come.
Al Knight of Fairplay (alknight@) is a former member of The Post’s editorial-page staff. His column appears on Wednesdays.
