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Archive for May 5th, 2007

Eight Gate — coming right along

OK, so I’m not interested in hearing any more whining about what a do-nothing Congress we’ve got … I don’t know where they’re finding the stamina for the assault on all that’s wrong, but they are. I still don’t trust the Democratic party but I trust that they found their years in oblivion so repugnant that they’ve come out swinging to right wrongs, and I’m behind them all the way. Yes — the Yellow Dog Dem’s [moderates] are a problem for the Base … and the Blue is split on what to do next to force Dubby into compliance, but at least everyone on that side of the aisle is listening to the American public. The far-Left wing of the Lefty party is not happy with the options presented by the Democratic Party as a whole, but we need to at minimum acknowledge that we have a CHOICE now — after years of eating dirt and being treated like the bastard son of the American political process.

The pursuit of Gonzales and the dots that lead back to the White House continues — here’s an update. Dan Froomkin is still our go-to guy for all the MSM blowback on insider stuff, so I’ve posted him first. Wrinkles include a subpoena for Rove’s emails — and it may turn out that Miss Monica the Christocrat wasn’t protecting her bosses, but herself. Last, it’s no surprise to me that my own state was ground zero for Rovian attentions — it’s a perfectly corrupt situation, here: Matt Blunt is #3 man in the GOP, his son [the Piglet] is the Governor and John Ashcroft, now a DC lobbyist, continues to smile down upon us all like a nekkid, but artfully draped, statue of Justice.

Jude

New Signs Point to the White House
Dan Froomkin, Washington Post
Thursday, May 3, 2007

[open for links to full articles]

Yesterday brought considerably more evidence of direct White House involvement in the overt politicization of the Justice Department — not only in terms of purging U.S. attorneys who may have been considered insufficiently partisan in their pursuit of criminal cases, but also in terms of filling career positions with attorneys who passed a political litmus test.

Dan Eggen and Amy Goldstein write in The Washington Post:

“The allegations against Monica M. Goodling represent a potential violation of federal law and signal that a joint probe begun in March by the department’s inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility has expanded beyond the controversial dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys last year.”

Evan Perez and Jess Bravin write in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required):

“Unlike U.S. attorneys, who are presidential political appointees, assistant U.S. attorneys are career employees not meant to be subject to political litmus tests in order to get or keep their jobs. Justice Department policy and federal law prohibit the department from considering political affiliation, among other factors, in deciding whether to hire or fire them.”

Richard B. Schmitt writes in the Los Angeles Times that the investigation “widens the probe into allegations of partisan hiring and firing at the agency and complicates the Bush administration’s efforts to weather the scandal.

“Goodling has become a focus of congressional investigators because she played a central role in identifying eight U.S. attorneys who were fired last year. The latest disclosure that she also was involved in the hiring of assistant U.S. attorneys shed new light on her clout at the Justice Department and raised more questions about how the agency has operated under Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales.”

But why was anyone at main Justice — not to mention a young political operative with no prosecutorial experience — involved in hiring career prosecutors in local U.S. attorney’s offices? Therein lies a tale.

Eric Lipton and David Johnston write in the New York Times:

“Normally, these lawyers are hired by United States attorneys. But when an interim United States attorney is in place, one who has not been confirmed by the Senate, he or she must seek the approval of officials at department headquarters, a rule that perhaps allowed Ms. Goodling to investigate the political backgrounds of the applicants.”

But a statement from Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd (Web-published as a Word Document by the Chicago Tribune) doesn’t in any way indicate there is any precedent for anyone in main Justice vetting individual hires: “By way of background, acting or interim U.S. Attorneys are limited in their authority to hire Assistant U.S. Attorneys and make other discretionary staff personnel changes,” Boyd explained. “This policy exists because hiring decisions are usually made by the Senate confirmed and presidentially appointed U.S. Attorney.

However, it is a longstanding DOJ practice to allow the interim or acting U.S. Attorneys to request that the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys (EOUSA) grant a waiver of this limitation due to turnover and workload demands during the nomination and confirmation process. EOUSA reviews the request for waivers to ensure that funding is sufficient to support the hires and also to ensure that upon confirmation, at a minimum, the incoming U.S. Attorney will have the ability to hire a First Assistant U.S. Attorney and a Secretary.”

Why Goodling? Well, it makes complete sense in light of this Murray Waas story from the National Journal on Monday:

“In the order, Gonzales delegated to his then-chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, and his White House liaison ‘the authority, with the approval of the Attorney General, to take final action in matters pertaining to the appointment, employment, pay, separation, and general administration’ of virtually all non-civil-service employees of the Justice Department, including all of the department’s political appointees who do not require Senate confirmation. . . .

“The existence of the order suggests that a broad effort was under way by the White House to place politically and ideologically loyal appointees throughout the Justice Department, not just at the U.S.-attorney level. Department records show that the personnel authority was delegated to the two aides at about the same time they were working with the White House in planning the firings of a dozen U.S. attorneys, eight of whom were, in fact, later dismissed.”

And you have to ask: Is it just a coincidence that so many U.S. attorney offices (21 out of 93 at last reckoning, according to this list) lack Senate-confirmed leaders with independent hiring authority? Could the ability to centrally vet the hiring of career prosecutors outside main Justice have contributed to some degree to the administration’s enthusiasm to fire Senate-confirmed U.S. attorneys — as well as its decision to stealthily insert a provision into the Patriot Act allowing interim U.S. attorneys to serve indefinitely?

As for who Goodling might have turned to in order to determine the political affilliation of job candidates? One can only guess.

Legal analyst Andrew Cohen blogs for washingtonpost.com:

“No one who has followed this story closely can be shocked by this news. Of course, the fix was in with the Goodling, Sampson and Co. to replace professional nonpartisan officials with partisans; of course White House leaders directed the plan, and of course the Attorney General either went along with it (as he always does with his president) or negligently allowed it to happen on his watch.”

And here’s an interesting side-note from the Perez and Bravin article:

“In mid-March, The Wall Street Journal sought information from the Justice Department on Ms. Goodling’s role in the selection of such prosecutors. The department turned down a request for expedited handling of the Journal’s query, citing that it ‘does not believe the specific topic of your request is the subject of widespread and exceptional media interest.’”

What the Fired Attorneys Heard

The House Judiciary Committee yesterday released statements from six of the fired U.S. attorneys, in which there are new indications of direct White House involvement.

Richard A. Serrano writes in the Los Angeles Times:

“According to written statements released Wednesday — her first public comments since testifying two months ago about her firing — [former San Diego U.S. attorney Carol Lam] said she was given just weeks to clear out of her office and was informed by Justice Department officials that her ouster was ‘coming from the very highest levels of the government.’”

After Lam was told she had been fired she pleaded with Michael Elston, the chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, for more time because of pending investigations and cases.

Serrano writes:

“Lam said Elston told her that her request for more time was ‘not being received positively,’ and ‘he insisted that I had to depart in a matter of weeks, not months, and that these instructions were ‘coming from the very highest level of the government.’ ”

Serrano writes, “several of the fired prosecutors said in the written statements that they could not get a truthful answer from [Michael A. Battle, then a Justice Department supervisor for U.S. attorneys,] when he called to tell them they were being terminated.
“David C. Iglesias, former U.S. attorney in Albuquerque, said he pressed Battle on why he was being removed, only to be told: ‘I don’t know and I don’t want to know.’”

James Rowley writes for Bloomberg that former Nevada U.S. attorney Daniel Bogden wrote in his statement about the rationale for his firing that he got from William Mercer, acting associate attorney general.

“Bogden said that neither Mercer nor Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty offered any other explanation for his dismissal. McNulty told Bogden that the order for his dismissal came from ‘higher up’ and that his performance in office ‘did not enter into the equation,’ the fired U.S. attorney wrote.”

On TPMMuckraker, Paul Kiel highlights a key section of the statement from Bud Cummins, who was forced out of his position as U.S. attorney in Little Rock to make way for Tim Griffin, a protege of White House political guru Karl Rove.

Gonzales and other officials have insisted they never intended to use the Patriot Act provision allowing them to circumvent Senate confirmation for U.S. attorneys. Cummins at one point called Elston to complain that there was no intention to put Griffin through the confirmation process.

Writes Cummins:

“Elston rejected that notion and assured me that every replacement would have to be confirmed by the Senate. I told him if that was the case, then he had better gag Tim Griffin because Griffin was telling many people, including me, that officials in Washington had assured him he could stay in as USA pursuant to an interim appointment whether he was ever nominated or not. Elston denied knowing anything about anyone’s intention to circumvent Senate confirmation in Griffin’s case. He said that might have been the White House’s plan, but they ‘never read DOJ into that plan’ and DOJ would never go along with it. This indicated to me that my removal had been dictated entirely by the White House. He said Griffin would be confirmed or have to resign. I remember that part of the conversation well because I then said to Elston that it looked to me that if Tim Griffin couldn’t get confirmed and had to then resign, then I would have resigned for nothing, and to that, after a brief pause Elston replied, ‘yes, that’s right.’”

Subpoena Watch

In the meantime, as Laurie Kellman writes for the Associated Press:

“‘It is troubling that significant documents highly relevant to the committee’s inquiry have not been produced,’ Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., wrote in a letter to Gonzales. The subpoena gives Gonzales until May 15 to turn over the information.”
Kevin Johnson and Donna Leinwand write in USA Today: “The subpoena for the Rove communications represents an ongoing effort by Democrats and some Republicans in Congress to assess the White House’s involvement in the firings.

“The Senate panel has sought to determine whether the administration specifically targeted the eight federal prosecutors for removal because of their decisions in politically charged criminal investigations.

“Rove’s name has surfaced in some e-mails related to strategic discussions about how the administration should proceed in removing federal prosecutors. Gonzales also has acknowledged that Rove spoke to him about ‘concerns that he had heard’ about an alleged failure to pursue voter fraud in some districts.”

Also yesterday, a bipartisan group of Judiciary Committee senators demanded that Gonzales turn over the internal order that Waas disclosed in the National Journal on Monday. Here’s that letter.

Impeach Gonzales?

Law professor Frank Bowman writes in a New York Times op-ed:

“Lying to Congress is a felony — actually three felonies: perjury, false statements and obstruction of justice.

“A false claim not to remember is just as much a lie as a conscious misrepresentation of a fact one remembers well. Instances of phony forgetfulness seem to abound throughout Mr. Gonzales’s testimony, but his claim to have no memory of the November Justice department meeting at which he authorized the attorney firings left even Republican stalwarts like Jeff Sessions of Alabama gaping in incredulity. The truth is almost surely that Mr. Gonzales’s forgetfulness is feigned — a calculated ploy to block legitimate Congressional inquiry into questionable decisions made by the Department of Justice, White House officials and, quite possibly, the president himself. . . .

“Congress should recognize that the issue here goes deeper than the misbehavior of one man. The real question is whether Republicans and Democrats are prepared to defend the constitutional authority of Congress against the implicit claim of an administration that it can do what it pleases and, when called to account, send an attorney general of the United States to Capitol Hill to commit amnesia on its behalf.”

Leahy Subpoenas Rove’s Plame Emails
Jason Leopold, t r u t h o u t | Report
Thursday 03 May 2007

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy issued a subpoena on Wednesday to Alberto Gonzales seeking emails that White House Political Adviser Karl Rove turned over to Patrick Fitzgerald related to the special prosecutor’s investigation into the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson and the role the White House political adviser played in her unmasking.

The subpoena comes on the heels of news reports that said the Justice Department’s inspector general is investigating a claim that former Gonzales aide Monica Goodling used political affiliation as the basis for screening applicants for assistant US attorney positions. The Justice Department said federal law prohibits such considerations in hiring prosecutors.

“Whether or not the allegation is true is currently the subject” of the investigation by the inspector general and the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility, Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said in a statement.

In a letter to Gonzales on Tuesday afternoon, Leahy reminded Gonzales that he had asked the attorney general during a hearing last month, and again in a letter dated April 25, whether the Justice Department was in possession of Rove’s emails and if Gonzales would turn them over to the Judiciary Committee voluntarily.

“You responded at the hearing that you did not know, but would check and get back to me,” Leahy wrote Gonzales. “I have not heard back from you since.”

The lack of a response from Gonzales prompted the Judiciary Committee to issue a subpoena on Tuesday compelling the Justice Department to turn over Rove’s emails, many of which were allegedly “lost” and later turned over to Fitzgerald, Leahy said, quoting Rove’s attorney Robert Luskin about the whereabouts of the documents. Leahy has set a deadline of May 15 for the emails to be turned over to his committee.

The subpoena covers a wide range of emails Rove sent over the past four years, some of which are also related to investigations underway by Congressional committees about the circumstances behind the firings of eight US attorneys last year. The firings appear to be politically motivated, Leahy said, and were apparently coordinated between the White House and officials in the Justice Department.

“This subpoena includes any such emails that were obtained by Mr. Fitzgerald as part of the Plame investigation,” Leahy’s letter says. Furthermore, Leahy wants Gonzales to turn over “any and all emails and attachments to emails to, from or copied to Karl Rove related to the committee’s investigation into the preservation of prosecutorial independence and the Department of Justice’s politicization of the hiring, firing and decision-making of United States attorneys from any (1) White House account, (2) Republican National Committee [RNC] account, or (3) other account in the possession, custody or control of the Department of Justice.”

Last month, the RNC disclosed that thousands of emails Rove sent over a four-year period via an email account maintained by the RNC may have been destroyed. The nonprofit government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington revealed in April that its own probe discovered that as many as five million White House emails were missing, in violation of the Presidential Records Act.

In a story first reported by Truthout last year, in a federal court document filed in January 2006 in US District Court in Washington, DC, Fitzgerald revealed that his investigative team “learned that not all email of the Office of the Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system.” That document was filed during the discovery phase of the perjury and obstruction-of-justice trial against former vice presidential staffer I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

Less than two weeks after Fitzgerald revealed that emails from the White House were missing, 250 pages of emails from President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney’s offices were turned over to investigators working for the special prosecutor - more than two years after the investigation began.

The White House offered no official explanation concerning the circumstances regarding the sudden reappearance of the emails it turned over to Fitzgerald on February 6, 2006, or if there was any truth to Fitzgerald’s allegations that the emails were not automatically archived. At the time, a White House spokeswoman would only say that staffers “discovered” the batch of documents during a search.

In late January 2004, Fitzgerald sent a letter to then-acting Attorney General James Comey seeking confirmation that he had the authority to investigate and prosecute suspects in the leak case for additional crimes, including evidence destruction.

The leak investigation had primarily been centered on an obscure law that made it a felony for any government official to knowingly disclose the identity of an undercover CIA officer.

Comey, who is scheduled to testify before Congress on Thursday about his knowledge of the events leading up to the firings of the US attorneys last year, responded to Fitzgerald in writing on February 6, 2004, confirming that Fitzgerald did indeed have the authority to prosecute those crimes, including “perjury, obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence and intimidation of witnesses.”

Fitzgerald wrote Comey in part because he had become suspicious that White House Political Adviser Karl Rove had either hidden or destroyed an important document tying him to the leak and the effort to discredit Plame’s husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson. The document Fitzgerald believed Rove had destroyed or withheld was an email Rove sent to Stephen Hadley, then-deputy national security adviser, in early July 2003. That email proved Rove had a conversation with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper about issues related to the CIA leak. Rove did not disclose that conversation when he was first interviewed by the FBI three months after he had emailed Hadley.

The same day that Fitzgerald received the written reply from Comey, the White House faced a deadline to turn over administration contacts with 25 journalists to the grand jury investigating the Plame Wilson leak. Cooper was one journalist cited in the subpoena sent to the White House on January 22, 2004. Curiously, the email Rove sent to Hadley did not show up during a search ordered by then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales in September 2003. Gonzales enjoined all White House staff members to turn over any communication pertaining to Plame Wilson and her husband, Joseph Wilson, a vocal critic of the Iraq war who had accused the Bush administration of twisting pre-war Iraq intelligence.

The directive came 12 hours after senior White House officials had been told of the pending investigation.

A number of theories emerged at the time in an attempt to explain why the emails had not been preserved. Media reports settled on the idea that White House computers simply broke down and failed to archive the emails.

According to a report in Newsweek, FBI investigators did not initially find the email Rove sent to Hadley because “the right search words weren’t used” three years ago.

The Washington Post, citing an unnamed source, reported that Rove had sent the email to
Hadley from his government account and it was “unclear” why the email did not turn up during a search in 2003.

Whether Fitzgerald knew in late January or early February 2004 about the existence of Rove’s email to Hadley is unknown. Neither Fitzgerald nor his spokesman would respond to questions about the leak investigation.

During two of his five appearances before the grand jury investigating the Plame Wilson leak, Rove testified that the first time he discussed Valerie Plame with journalists was after syndicated columnist Robert Novak revealed her identity and CIA status in July 2003. Rove did not disclose that he had actually been a source for Cooper, whose story about Plame’s work for the CIA was published less than a week after Novak’s column was published.

When Fitzgerald applied pressure to Cooper to testify about the identity of the source who told him that Plame worked for the CIA, Rove’s attorney Robert Luskin made a startling discovery: He found the email Rove sent to Hadley.

Luskin told Fitzgerald that he had a conversation with Time magazine reporter Viveca Novak in February 2004 and she inadvertently revealed that Rove had been a source for her colleague Matt Cooper.

Following his meeting with Viveca Novak, Luskin met with Rove and told him that Novak said he was Cooper’s source. Luskin and Rove then did an exhaustive search through White House phone logs and emails to find any evidence that Rove spoke with Cooper. That’s when the email Rove sent to Hadley was discovered, Luskin said, which he promptly turned over to Fitzgerald and which led Rove to change his testimony.

However, Luskin would not say when he turned it over, or why the email wasn’t found when the White House was subpoenaed on January 22, 2004 or when White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales ordered all White House staff in October 2003 to turn over emails and other documentary evidence that showed officials had spoken with journalists.

Luskin testified on December 2, 2005 regarding his meeting with Viveca Novak. He said that he met with her in late January or early February 2004, the very month in which Fitzgerald had sought the authority to prosecute officials if they were found to have hindered his investigation into the leak.

Viveca Novak (who bears no relation to the columnist Robert Novak), however, testified that she met Luskin in either March or May 2004. Still, Rove didn’t reveal to the grand jury until October 15, 2004 that he had spoken with Cooper.

Luskin has said that Rove did not intentionally withhold information from Fitzgerald or the grand jury about his conversation with Cooper. Rather, he said, Rove had simply forgotten about it and Luskin’s meeting with Novak had jogged his memory. ++

Rove coached Justice staff before key hearing
Michael Roston, Raw Story
Friday May 4, 2007

Top White House political adviser Karl Rove coached a Justice Department staff member before he testified to a Congressional commitee in March, according to a report in Newsweek. Some investigators reportedly believe that he may have tried to “mislead” Congress.

“Although the existence of the White House meeting had been previously disclosed by the Justice Department, Rove’s attendance at the strategy session was not—until both [Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General William] Moscella and Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty talked about it in confidential testimony with congressional investigators last week,” according to a Democratic aide who spoke with Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff.

The aide argued that Rove withheld information from Moscella, who had not been aware of White House involvement in the firings, effectively amounting to an effort to mislead Congress.

“Rove and Kelley never told Moscella about the White House’s own role in pushing to have some U.S. Attorneys fired in the first place. Moscella followed the coaching by Rove and others—and made no mention of White House involvement in the firings during his March 6, 2007 testimony to House Judiciary,” Isikoff explained.

The Newsweek reporter said the White House was defending any attendance of Rove at the meeting.

“A White House spokesman dismissed the significance of the March meeting, saying it was not surprising that a Deputy White House Chief of Staff like Rove would participate in internal discussions about the firings of presidential appointees,” he wrote.

But, he noted, the White House spokesman would not comment on whether or not Rove had acted as accused of by the Congressional staffer.

Isikoff suggested there would be more to come as a consequence of the disclosure.

“The new disclosure about his participation in the March 5 strategy session is likely to fuel the committee’s determination to keep the heat on,” he concluded.

Isikoff’s full article can be found at this link.

Cummins Confirms That Justice Dept. Used Pregnancy As Excuse To Appoint Griffin
Think Progress
5/3/07

In June 2006, the Justice Department fired Bud Cummins as U.S. attorney in Arkansas and replaced him with Karl Rove-protege Tim Griffin.

In a Dec. 26, 2006 article in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse explained that they “temporarily” appointed Griffin, rather than Bud Cummins’ deputy Jane Duke, because Duke was pregnant:

He noted that often, the first assistant U.S. attorney in the affected district will serve as the acting U.S. attorney until the formal nomination process begins for a replacement. But in this case, “the first assistant is on maternity leave,” he said, referring to Jane Duke, who gave birth to twins earlier than expected the same week of the announcement.

As ThinkProgress noted earlier, on Jan. 11, Sen. Mark Pryor (R-AR) wrote a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and expressed concern with the maternity leave excuse, saying that it “concerns me on several levels, but most importantly it uses pregnancy and motherhood as conditions that deny an appointment.”

Yesterday, the House Judiciary Committee made public Cummins’s written testimony following his March 6 appearance before the panel. Cummins confirmed that pregnancy and motherhood were used as excuses to deny an appointment. He added that Roehrkasse’s statement was “ridiculous” and “mocked” by people in the Arkansas legal community because Duke would have been perfectly able to serve as an interim U.S. attorney “for six weeks or more” if she would have been asked:

I told Elston that most people in our relatively small legal community had instantly mocked that statement because it was obvious Tim Griffin had been here for months for the purpose of taking over on my departure, because no person was aware of any conversations or other communications that might demonstrate that appointing the First Assistant was EVER a consideration, and because even though she actually had left the office a week before (on or about December 14) to give birth to twins, her due date was much later in early February and until she went out for an emergency delivery the week before she had been widely expected to continue to work in the office until February, so she actually could have been available for six weeks or more to serve as an interim had anybody ever considered that option. Nobody had and that was obvious. I told them it was a ridiculous thing to say in light of what many people here knew and that they shouldn’t repeat it.

The Pregnancy Discrimination Act states that employers, including the federal government, cannot discriminate on the “basis of pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions.”

Using discrimination against women as an excuse to install a political loyalist is no better. ++

Keeping It Close
by digby, Hullabaloo
5/4/07

I have said throughout the Bush years that Democrats suffered from the fact that we not only had to win, but we had to win big enough that the Republicans can’t steal it. In a country that is closely divided as ours has been throughout this period, particularly in important swing states, suppressing the Democratic vote was an excellent way for GOP crooks and cheaters to win.

Here’s McClatchy’s latest on Missouri:

The threat to the integrity of the election was seen as so grave that Bradley Schlozman, the acting chief of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and later the U.S. attorney in Kansas City, twice wielded the power of the federal government to try to protect the balloting. The Republican-controlled Missouri General Assembly also stepped into action.

Now, six months after freshman Missouri Sen. Jim Talent’s defeat handed Democrats control of the U.S. Senate, disclosures in the wake of the firings of eight U.S. attorneys show that that Republican campaign to protect the balloting was not as it appeared. No significant voter fraud was ever proved.

The preoccupation with ballot fraud in Missouri was part of a wider national effort that critics charge was aimed at protecting the Republican majority in Congress by dampening Democratic turnout. That effort included stiffer voter-identification requirements, wholesale purges of names from lists of registered voters and tight policing of liberal get-out-the-vote drives.

Bush administration officials deny those claims. But they’ve gotten traction in recent weeks because three of the U.S. attorneys ousted by the Justice Department charge that they lost their jobs because they failed to prove Republican allegations of voter fraud. They say their inquiries found little evidence to support the claims.

Few have endorsed the strategy of pursuing allegations of voter fraud with more enthusiasm than White House political guru Karl Rove. And nowhere has the plan been more apparent than in Missouri.

With populations that don’t necessarily trust the authorities to be impartial even when the stakes are huge, asking them to run a gauntlet of legal hurdles in order to vote pretty much assures that quite a few of them won’t bother. In a cynical nation that can barely get a majority of its eligible citizens to vote anyway, you can potentially peel off a percentage or two just by making voting a pain in the neck.

You would think that nobody in his right mind would actually work to keep the country divided so they can steal elections, but you have to wonder if that played a factor in Rove’s “feed the base” legislative strategy,which Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson described in their book Off Center as a conscious choice to pass bills with as few members of the other party as possible — a highly unusual and perhaps unprecedented way of doing things. This was done ostensibly to deliver to a base that they believed was large enough to win elections on its own (with the help of a handful of faux moderates who were given “backlash insurance”) as well as keep the other side looking helpless and foolish as they could never quite win anything at all, thus demoralizing their own base.

I have no way of knowing, of course, but it would be in keeping with the hubristic and reflexively dishonest Rovian approach to politics if rather than seeking to truly create a governing majority, he consciously sought to keep the electorate very closely polarized so that he could both deliver to the base and keep them engaged — and also win those necessarily close elections through the most sophisticated voter suppression machine in history. (And yes, there were probably shenanigans with the voting machines as well.)

It’s only a crackpot theory, but it wouldn’t surprise me. The man always assumed he could keep a hundred balls in the air at once. Unfortunately, his president and vehicle for this new political machine was so inept at actual governance that the Democrats were able to win big enough in 2006 that he couldn’t steal it. And now they have subpoena power. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

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