This issue isn't about hiring and firing Attorneys General, it's about this administration's attempt to expand the powers of the President.
I'm sure Karl Rove is pissed. I know I would be if I had this great plan for a permanent Republican majority and have it screwed up by the likes of George Bush, Harriet Miers and Alberto Gonzales, to say nothing of thickheads like Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld. "Jesus!", he must be saying to himself, "can't these people secure an ever enlarging grip on power without leaving any fingerprints like me?"
From the very beginning, Rove's, and, to be fair, Cheney's idea of creating an American Presidency without limited powers has been at the core of every action they have taken. Before you reject that notion out of hand, look back at the way this administration interacted with Congress in first five years :loyalty to the President's views and strict obedience in voting (enforced by Tom DeLay) were the litmus tests applied to Republican Members of Congress. Democrats were seldom, if ever, spoken to or of. When Republican Congressmen tried to take initiatives into their own hands, they were punished. See this from Off the Kuff 2005:
Quote:yanked his chairmanship in January. Rep. Rob Simmons, R-Conn., lost his chairmanship of the VA health subcommittee, and Rep. Rick Renzi, R-Ariz., is no longer on the committee. They too had signed the letters to Hastert, R-Ill., and DeLay, R-Texas.
<sigh>
It was probably a mistake to make Gonzales the US Attorney General, but I know it must have seemed right to Bush. This was the same guy who came up with ways
to get suspend the Geneva Conventions, to make
warrant-less spying on American okie-dokie-smokie and still thinks the President ought to be able to hold anyone without charges for as long as the President deems necessary. (President Mugabe of Zimbabwe has that power, why not George?) What's a little writ of habeas corpus ad subjiciendum got to do with running a country the way it ought to be run, by God?
Things could be worse: George might have stayed the course on Harriet Miers' Supreme Court nomination.
Joe(words fail me)Nation