Issues & Opinions

In an editorial today, the WSJ describes the reasons that Monica Gooding, a Justice Department’s liaison to the White House, will be exercising her Fifth Amendment right to not provide testimony to Patrick Leahy’s Senate Judiciary Committee.

Long story short:

Ms. Goodling has been around, and she can see Democrats don’t really want to know the truth; they want to shout “liar, liar” and set the stage to accuse Justice officials of criminal behavior. In a statement to the committee explaining her decision, Ms. Goodling said, “I have read public remarks by members of both the House and Senate Committees on the Judiciary in which those members have drawn conclusions about the subject matter and the testimony now under investigation by the Committee.”

They continue, a bit later, with this:

Count Ms. Goodling’s silence as one more unintended consequence of the Scooter Libby case. Mr. Libby made the mistake of cooperating with the investigation into a leak he had nothing to do with, and he later found himself charged with perjury based on little more than conflicting memories of who said what and when. The prosecutor never even charged anyone for the leak that started it all.

There’s no apparent underlying crime in this “scandal” either, but we’ll bet more than one Democrat will soon be calling for a “special prosecutor” to investigate it nonetheless.

The editorial page makes good and valid points. However, according to a story yesterday in USA Today:

In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday-Sunday, respondents said by nearly 3-to-1 that Congress should issue subpoenas to force White House officials to testify.

A majority (53%-26%) of the respondents thought that the attorneys were fired for political reasons rather than for job performance, and a majority (59%-30%) thought that the Democrats were investigating for primarily political, rather than ethical, reasons.

All three majorities are correct, in my opinion, though the impact of their being correct, and the focus that they and the Senate are taking appears misguided.

Yes, of course the attorneys were fired for political reasons, in some cases coincident with them not having done their jobs. They were political appointees, and as such, can be politically un-appointed at the discretion of the administration. This should not be a matter of concern or angst on anyone’s part, and I find it humorous that it is.

Yes, of course the Senate Democrats are trying to embarrass the administration, and that’s the way things have been done for much of the past decade or so. As much as I personally wish it could be stopped, this, too, should not be a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention, and I find it humorous that it is.

Yes, subpoenas should be issued, and yes, the Senate should get their grandstanding and shaming done. But the focus, on the “politically motivated firing of US Attorneys”, is the problem. The real issue to investigate is the obfuscation from Gonzales’ office about what happened, why, when, and how.

Like so many things in the current Administration, rather than just having come out and said “We fired some political appointees. For political reasons. Get over it.”, it appears that there was some level of effort put into shoving the story under the rug. “Mistakes were made”, said Gonzales, in the Washington Post article linked above.

It’s the mistakes, the misstatements, and the mishandling that should be investigated, not (all due respect to Stuart Gerson, who claims that such mid-term firings shouldn’t be done), the unobjectionable dis-appointment of political appointees.

It’s all about the ham-handedness, you see.