Alberto Gonzales finally resigns

After months of continued calls for his resignation from both sides of the aisle, Alberto Gonzales has finally resigned. This was not the first time a pal of the President made it to a top cabinet position, nor will be the last. But it shows how the position of the Justice Department’s top official is too important to be filled on the basis of cronyism.

The showdown of the past months between Gonzales and Congress has been instrumental in Gonzales’ demise, as one of Bush’s more trusted legal counsels. But in the end his loyalty for the White House got in the way of his duty as Attorney General, where he was supposed to be lawyer of the people, not lawyer of the White House.

Even before Gonzales became Attorney General, he seemed more interested in justifying the administration’s aggressive use of executive powers than in applying the law. Even as White House counsel, his legal opinions seemed to spread the Constitution to provide a rationale for abandoning the Geneva Conventions in the basis of terrorism suspects. This was evident in the infamous memo, which Gen. Colin Powell, Secretary of State at the time, denounced on the basis of Gonzales declarations which had stated the Geneva Conventions to be “obsolete’ and “quaint” when it deferred to the treatment of prisoners of war. But this was not the only shadow in Gonzales’s record. Then came the famous visit he made to then Attorney General Ashcroft’s hospital bed in order to obtain a signature that would reauthorize the controversial warrantless eavesdropping surveillance program designed to stop terrorism.

What finally topped the ice cream cone though, was the unexpected firings of nine U.S. attorneys at the beginning of the year, which now is believed to have been in the basis of political retaliation for supposedly failing to attain the legal conservative agenda of Bush’s White House. What ensued after, was a political power struggle between the hill and the White House. Emails got erased, aides got reassigned, a total of 12 top Department of Justice officials have resigned or been relocated to other posts. That on top of possible perjury charges against Gonzales for continuously changing his testimony during several hearings in Congress has completely drained his lack of shame.

Let this show that cronyism has no agenda, place or counsel in government and public service. One would have expected Bush to wake up and realize this, after the disastrous Katrina/FEMA incident, but sometimes losing a battle is not enough. In his last 17-months, lame-duck presidential time left, he has time to turn back and voices to appease, if he is to purge his administration of the crony monster that dwells within.