When President Bush announced today that Alberto Gonzales had resigned, I did a little dance. So did thousands of other relieved Americans, if only symbolically. It is interesting to deconstruct for a moment one small portion of the president’s speech announcing the long-awaited event.
The president calls Gonzales a man of “integrity, decency and principle.”
Let’s deal with this issue of principle. A person with principles, one might venture, especially an attorney general, would uphold the basic principles of our Constitution. Especially the right against unreasonable search and seizure and the right to privacy, two pillars of not only American law, but of the laws of most nations claimed to be ruled by them.
And yet Gonzales has done his level best, at the president’s prodding, to claim that unreasonable search and seizure and privacy protections apply to only some Americans some of the time. They certainly don’t apply, he claims, to some Americans in extraordinary times such as these, times of war. Gonzales and those who support his views seem to believe that the threat of terrorism exempts his officials from their obligation under the Constitution to obtain permission to wiretap Americans. The establishment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 1978 made obtaining wiretaps in cases of suspected terrorism even easier for law enforcement personnel. In fact, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant could even be obtained after the fact.
But the Gonzales and the Bush administration would have none of this. Gonzales asserted that the president had the authority, under Article II of the Constitution, to monitor communications between Americans and people outside the United States without a warrant. He justified this with references to Washington’s, Wilson’s, and Roosevelt’s similar actions during wartime. He further stated that Congress had authorized the president to conduct warrantless surveillance under the Authorization for Use of Military Force, Public Law 107-40, of September 18, 2001.
However, the law stated that the president may use “all necessary and appropriate force” against the sordid gang that committed the September 11 atrocities and those that helped them to do so. The president and the attorney general have a lot of leeway to interpret the necessary portion of this statement; the appropriate portion, much less so as it is confined by the law.
Is it reasonable for the administration to have argued that it was “appropriate” for the president to have ignored the Fourth Amendment? I think not. No president may do this. Although nearly all Americans, I presume, support reasonable efforts to prevent terrorist attacks, few of us would support giving up our civil liberties in order to gain such illusory safety. Even if this were not true, these liberties are protected unequivocally by our Constitution. The majority, if such a majority exists, may not take these protections away.
Isn’t freedom what we’re told we’re fighting for in Iraq and Afghanistan? If we must protect freedom abroad, surely we must protect it at home. Now that Gonzales is gone, I feel a little more free. I’ll feel even better on January 20, 2009.
Is Gonzales a man of principle? Maybe, but certainly a man of the wrong principles. The nation is better for his resignation. It is too bad that Gonzales was brought down not by this erroneous application of what he thought was the law, but by the administration’s petty political vendettas against judges it thought were not performing up to par. In any case, Gonzales will soon be gone, but the feculent ideas he embodied still remain. We may not be able to breathe easier until 2009, but at least the air is getting a little less cloudy.
