Most readers of /The Washington Post/ probably missed it. But probably not Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Fifty-six of his law school classmates (Harvard Law School, class of 1982) bought space for an open letter in mid-May that excoriated his “cavalier handling of our freedoms time and again.”
It read like an indictment, to wit:
“Witness your White House memos sweeping aside the Geneva Conventions to justify torture, endangering our own servicemen and women;
“Witness your advice to the President effectively reading Habeas Corpus out of our constitutional protections;
“Witness your support of presidential statements claiming inherent power to wiretap American citizens without warrants (and the Administration’s stepped-up wiretapping campaign, taking advantage of those statements, which continues on your watch to this day); and
“Witness your dismissive explanation of the troubling firings of numerous U.S. Attorneys, and their replacement with other more ‘loyal’ to the President’s politics, as merely ‘an overblown personal matter.’
“In these and other actions, we see a pattern. As a recent editorial put it, your approach has come to symbolize ‘disdain for the separation of powers, civil liberties and the rule of law.’”
By now you’re expecting something like a conclusion by his classmates, such as a demand for resignation or a call for Gonzales’ impeachment. No such logic.
Instead, these intrepid classmates punted, urging Gonzales and President Bush “to relent from this reckless path, and begin to restore respect for the rule of law
...
Compare the many impeachable offenses of Bush-Cheney with the certain impeachment of President Richard K. Nixon that was rendered moot by his resignation in 1974.
Compare the actual impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton by a Republican-controlled House of Representatives in 1998 for lying under oath about sex. ... But Bush-Cheney’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” tower in scope and diversity over those earlier Presidents. ...
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