In the Dem debate in Iowa this morning, Hillary stuck by her foreign policy criticism of Obama, Edwards vowed to eliminate nukes from the planet, and Obama revealed that he prepared for the debate by riding bumper cars at a local state fair. Those and other items in our Election Central Debate Roundup.
Given that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ ongoing trouble with the truth made headlines again this week, and his record for dishonesty can now be summarized into an impressive list, the NYT’s Adam Cohen broaches a subject first raised by the Times’ editorial board last month: impeaching the Attorney General.
Impeachment of Mr. Gonzales would fit comfortably into the founders’ framework. No one could charge this Congress with believing that executive branch members serve at the “pleasure of the Senate” or the House. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has indicated that impeachment of President Bush is “off the table,” and there has been little talk of impeaching Vice President Dick Cheney or others in the administration.
Congress has heard extensive testimony about how Mr. Gonzales’s Justice Department has become an arm of a political party, choosing lawyers for nonpartisan positions based on politics, and bringing cases — including prosecutions that have put people in jail — to help Republicans win elections.
Mr. Gonzales’s repeated false and misleading statements to Congress are also impeachable conduct. James Iredell, whom George Washington would later appoint to the Supreme Court, told North Carolina’s ratification convention that “giving false information to the Senate” was the sort of act “of great injury to the community” that warranted impeachment.
The United States attorneys scandal is also the sort of abuse the founders worried about. Top prosecutors, most with sterling records, were apparently fired because they refused to let partisan politics guide their decisions about whether to prosecute. Madison, the father of the Constitution, noted in a speech to the first Congress that “wanton removal of meritorious officers would subject” an official to impeachment.
By the way, for those keeping score at home, Rep. Jay Inslee’s (D-Wash.) House resolution on Gonzales’ impeachment has an underwhelming 27 co-sponsors.
Cohen’s piece makes a compelling case that the remedy is legitimate in Gonzales’ case, but if there’s little political will for impeaching the AG, it’s largely an academic exercise.
As a helpful companion piece to the McClatchy article from yesterday, the Washington Post moves the ball forward today on Rove & Co.’s legally dubious, partisan political briefings, with an informative front-page piece.
With a few details we haven’t seen before, the Post explained that Rove established an “asset deployment” team in the White House early in Bush’s first term that was responsible for coordinating official announcements, high-visibility administration trips, and declarations of federal grants based on Republican congressional candidates in need of a boost.
Investigators, however, said the scale of Rove’s effort is far broader than previously revealed; they say that Rove’s team gave more than 100 such briefings during the seven years of the Bush administration. The political sessions touched nearly all of the Cabinet departments and a handful of smaller agencies that often had major roles in providing grants, such as the White House office of drug policy and the State Department’s Agency for International Development.
The U.S. Office of Special Counsel and the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee are investigating whether any of the meetings violated the Hatch Act, which prohibits government employees from using federal resources for election activities. They also want to know whether any Bush appointees pressured government for favorable actions such as grants to help GOP electoral chances.
“What we are seeing is the tip of a whole effort to make the federal government a subsidiary of the Republican Party. It was all politics, all the time,” Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the oversight committee, said last week.
Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), the 2002 chairman of the NRCC’s efforts, said Rove “didn’t do these things half-baked. It was total commitment.” Davis added, “We knew history was against us [in ’02], and he helped coordinate all of the accoutrements of the executive branch to help with the campaign, within the legal limits.” It was good of Davis to add those last four words, wasn’t it?
The Gavel has more on this today.
For a variety of reasons I try to stay out of the debates over blogs as such, what they’re good or bad at and the rest. But this morning I was alerted to an opinion column in the Los Angeles Times by Michael Skube, a journalism professor at Elon University. The sum of the piece is that the blogosphere is as rife with disputation as it is thin on information, or more specifically, reporting, writing that demands “time, thorough fact-checking and verification and, most of all, perseverance.”
Now, fair enough. There’s certainly no end of blog pontificating fueled by puffed-up self-assertion rather than facts. But Skube’s piece reads with a vagueness that suggests he has less than a passing familiarity with the topic at issue. And I will confess to you that what really caught my attention was that in a column bewailing how blogs don’t do any real reporting one of the four bloggers he mentioned was me.
Now, whether we do any quality reporting at TPM is a matter of opinion. And everyone is entitled to theirs. So against my better judgment, I sent Skube an email telling him that I found it hard to believe he was very familiar with TPM if he was including us as examples in a column about the dearth of original reporting in the blogosphere.
Now, I get criticized plenty. And that’s fair since I do plenty of criticizing. And I wouldn’t raise any of this here if it weren’t for what came up in Skube’s response.
Not long after I wrote I got a reply: “I didn’t put your name into the piece and haven’t spent any time on your site. So to that extent I’m happy to give you benefit of the doubt …”
This seemed more than a little odd since, as I said, he certainly does use me as an example — along with Sullivan, Matt Yglesias and Kos. So I followed up noting my surprise that he didn’t seem to remember what he’d written in his own opinion column on the very day it appeared and that in any case it cut against his credibility somewhat that he wrote about sites he admits he’d never read.
To which I got this response: “I said I did not refer to you in the original. Your name was inserted late by an editor who perhaps thought I needed to cite more examples … ”
And this is from someone who teaches journalism?
Perhaps I’m naive. But it surprises me a great deal that a professor of journalism freely admits that he allows to appear under his own name claims about a publication he concedes he’s never read.
Actually, if you look at what he says, it seems Skube’s editor at the Times oped page didn’t think he had enough specific examples in his article decrying our culture of free-wheeling assertion bereft of factual backing. Or perhaps any examples. So the editor came up with a few blogs to mention and Skube signed off. And Skube was happy to sign off on the addition even though he didn’t know anything about them.
I grant you that the blogosphere needs better bloggers. But, as usual, the need for better critics seems even more acute.
Fox News spokesman justifies Sean Hannity’s fundraiser for Rudy Giuliani as follows: “Sean is not a journalist.” That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Morning Roundup.
The FBI takes a look at Rep. Don Young’s (R-AK) Constitution-shredding, fat-cat-benefiting earmark.
Miss yesterday’s Dem debate? We’ve got all the highlights in today’s Debate Roundup episode of TPMtv …
In this installment of the Congress-administration ongoing subpoena drama, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) says that the White House hasn’t responded to his committee’s subpoena for documents relating to the warrantless surveillance program, and that if that doesn’t change by September, then a contempt of Congress citation may be coming their way.