The Supreme connection?
It's not for lack of interest that I've not written much about the AttorneyGate (Purgegate, US Attorney Abuse, call it what you will) scandal until now. It's mainly because I can barely keep up with developments, and didn't have legal expertise or other contributions to bring to the discussion.

But -- unlike so many of Bush's and Gonzales' gophers these days -- I can remember stuff. And with so much attention understandably focused on Attorney General Gonzales and Boy Wonder Karl Rove, it seems to me another key player in the story (besides Bush himself, of course) is getting unfairly overlooked -- Harriet Miers, the President's former legal counsel.

Harriet Miers' fingerprints are all over the firings of eight US attorneys for their too-vigorous prosecutions of Republicans and/or their refusals to prosecute Democrats for bogus "voter fraud" cases. Yesterday, one of the few things that Gonzales ex-staffer Kyle Sampson was able to remember was

SAMPSON: Well, Judicial Selection Committee meetings happen regularly, approximately once a week; maybe something less than that. It would be canceled from time to time. And the issue of U.S. attorney replacements was quite episodic, you know, in the thinking phase of this through 2005 and 2006. And it would just come up occasionally after a Judicial Selection meeting, usually between myself and Harriet Miers and Bill Kelley.

And one thing I remember about Harriet Miers is that -- for one brief and shining moment in the fall of 2005 -- she was about to be a Supreme Court justice. At the time, it seemed like a combination of underwhelming ability and insufficient conservative bona fides eventually scuttled the nomination; the question left unanswered was why Bush had ever chosen Miers in the first place.

That question now has yet another interesting possible answer. While it was always thought likely that Miers would be "in the bag" for any cases involving Bush's myriad other crimes -- torture, illegal surveillance, what have you -- there was less talk (that I recall, anyway) about stuff with Miers' own fingerprints on it. Like AttorneyGate, where Miers' correspondence with Sampson about firing US Attorneys began in February 2005, well before her nomination on October 3, 2005.

And indeed, the Miers nomination fiasco foreshadowed today's in one particularly revealing way; when President Bush "reluctantly accepted" Miers' request to step aside as nominee on October 27, 2005, he also said that the Senate's interest in internal White House documents "would undermine a president's ability to receive candid counsel."

A couple of things stand out to me about the AttorneyGate story thus far:

1. The Bush people spent a whole lot of time and effort on it;
2. It was so important to them -- and they were so sure they could do it -- that, as Harold Meyerson pointed out, they went ahead with plans even after getting destroyed at the polls last November, all but guaranteeing them Congressional hearings on the subject.
   

Now it's possible you could chalk up some of this to hubris and/or stupidity, like so much else with the Bushies. But maybe they felt like they had an ace up their sleeve -- just the way this whole operation may have been what made Dubya so very sure he'd win in the runup to last November's elections (and so publicly ticked off at Rove when he got his clock cleaned instead).

And Harriet Miers isn't the only person who could shed light on just how far the Rove/Bush plan went... or still goes. After all, it took only four days to anoint her successor -- and Justice Samuel Alito is well known for his enthusiasms for the unitary executive, signing statements, and unchecked, expanded presidential power generally. Plan B was oiled and ready.

If Harriet Miers ever appears before the Senate and/or House Judiciary Committees under oath, she may get asked questions like these:

• "Did you ever discuss the propriety, legality, or constitutionality of firing prosecutors for being too nonpartisan?"
• "Did you ever discuss the propriety, legality, or constitutionality of using the Justice Department for partisan political purposes, such as vote suppression in national elections?"
• "Did you ever discuss whether you believed executive privilege would apply to evidence of plans to do either of these things?"
• "Did you ever agree to rule in favor of the Bush administration should such issues come before you in the Supreme Court?"
  

Point being, the same questions might be usefully put to Justices Alito and Roberts.

Now this may seem like overreach, it may even seem irresponsible. But time and again, as Josh Marshall has observed, the safest conclusion about any given scandal in the Bush era has turned out to be that it would go much, much further than anyone believed it would. In which case, to echo Peggy Noonan's famous line:

"Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to."

Admittedly, of course, this isn't about anything as serious as a blow job, it's just about suborning the legal machinery of the United States for partisan political gain.


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NOTES: "unlike" -- Steve Benen, "Carpetbagger Report"; "so many" -- Howard Kurtz, Washington Post, 3/30/07; "Gonzales' gophers" -- "Taking One for the Team, When He Could Remember", Dana Milbank, Washington Post, 3/30/07; "Yesterday" -- Senate Judiciary hearing transcript, 3/29/07, via Washington Post; "would undermine" -- "President's Statement on Harriet Miers' Supreme Court Nomination Withdrawal," 10/27/05, White House web site; "a whole lot of time" -- TPM USA Attorney scandal timeline; "Harold Meyerson" -- "The Republican Mystery," Washington Post, 3/28/07; "so very sure" -- digby ("Hullabaloo"): "Naht guh happen", 9/9/06; "unitary executive" etc. -- this blog, "Dear Senate Democrats: filibuster Alito", 1/26/06; "vote suppression" -- "Bush's long history of tilting Justice," Joseph Rich (former DoJ lawyer), LA Times, 3/29/07, via Paul Kiel (TPM Muckraker). posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:45:00 PM -- |    

 
Heh. Indeed.
Oliver Willis thinks about Gonzales gopher Monica Goodling taking the 5th, and then offers free advice on perjury to Republicans: "stop lying so much."

James Wolcott:

If I could trademark the phrase "The Democrats need to be careful...," I could retire in a few years to Cape May and build bat houses for needy bats. For six years we've had no Congressional oversight whatsoever over the rot and ruin of the Bush administration, and as soon as the first flexings of oversight are made, we get a plethora of Poloniuses dribbling advice (and as Saul Bellow reminded us, one of the nice things about Hamlet is that Polonius gets stabbed).

digby ("Hullabaloo"), commenting on a USA Today story (by Chuck Raasch) reporting that some GOP Senators -- but not Arlen Spector! -- are suffering from "scandal fatigue" re AttorneyGate: "how can you expect the Republicans to defend this country if they can't even defend their own Attorney General?" For my part, I disagree with the related USA Today headline: Controversy takes toll on Gonzales' image -- it's like "Dead man drowned"; I just don't see how it's possible.

Jesus' General congratulates Texas state senator Dan Patrick for recently proposing the Texas Baby Purchasing Act of 2007: "Undoubtedly, it will save the lives of many blastocyst-Americans." But the General doesn't want it to stop there: "But what about their tiny spermatazoan-American brothers? Your bill does nothing to protect them. [...] It's a lot easier to protect spermatazoan-Americans than you might think. All you need is a few collection points around the state, a number of modified milking machines, a good supply of mason jars," etc. etc.

The Editors of the flagship publication of the "The Poor Man Institute": The House and Senate are shrill.

Roy Edroso ("alicublog"): "SHORTER DR. MRS. OLE PERFESSER: I diagnose liberals as crazy by their bumper stickers. Top that, Krauthammer!"

Did you know that Fox Home Entertainment's "FoxFaith" division "has shipped over 25 million units of faith-based product in the last two years"? Halleluia! (At least, so they believe.) -- For that matter, did you know "Regular syrup is a full-calorie corn syrup based product. Lite syrup is also a corn syrup based product, but has only half the calories of regular syrup [...] MRS. BUTTERWORTH'S and LOG CABIN syrup products together have a leading 34% share of the syrup category"? Well, now you know that, too.



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NOTES: "possible" leads to a January 2005 post of mine, "Alberto Gonzales: forward-leaning yes man."; "Texas Baby Purchasing Act" link leads to Culture Kitchen, where that whole farce is explained for you; "faith-based product" via Garance Franke-Ruta ("TAPPED") and Paperwight. posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:15:00 PM -- |    

 
Huskers beat Huskies, 2-1
By 50-48, Senate Democrats have defeated an amendment to strike the Iraq withdrawal timetable from H.R.1591, the Obey Iraq supplemental bill -- with some critical help from Nebraska. TPM's Greg Sargent:

Conservative Democrat Ben Nelson -- a potential supporter of the amendment -- stuck with the Democrats and opposed it. On the GOP side, Senators Chuck Hagel and Gordon Smith voted against it.

Meanwhile, vulnerable GOP Senator Susan Collins voted for it, as did her colleague Olympia Snowe (and as did Lieberman).

This seemed possible since yesterday when minority leader Mitch McConnell announced he wouldn't block the Senate version of the House supplemental appropriations bill (H.R.1591) with parliamentary delaying tactics requiring 60 votes to overcome.

Still, despite having heard Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE) was going to support benchmarks for withdrawal, I was skeptical he'd actually vote with the rest of the Democrats until I saw it on the Senate web site. I'm just about as pleasantly surprised by Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) , who in the past has often talked about opposing Bush, but then still voted for him when push came to shove.

So color Nebraska a nice deep blue for now-- bluer than Connecticut at any rate, where Senators Dodd (D-CT) and Lieberman voted against eachother. Go Huskers!


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NOTE: "announced"-- Anne Flaherty, "Senate GOP Will Not Block Iraq Bill,"AP via Washington Post, 3/26. posted by Thomas Nephew at 7:26:00 PM -- |    

 
The Lives of Others

• Terror Database Has Quadrupled In Four Years: U.S. Watch Lists Are Drawn From Massive Clearinghouse, Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, 3/25/07
• City Police Spied Broadly Before G.O.P. Convention, Jim Dwyer, New York Times, 3/25/07
• My National Security Letter Gag Order, Anonymous, Washington Post, 3/23/07
• Justice Dept. to Examine Its Use of NSA Wiretaps: Review Won't Address Program's Legality, Dan Eggen, Washington Post, 11/28/06
  

I saw the Oscar-winning German movie "The Lives of Others" yesterday, about the surveillance of a fictitious playwright Georg Dreymann (Sebastian Koch) by East German "Stasi" operative Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe).

The movie -- written and directed by relative newcomer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck -- succeeds completely in immersing its audience in the fear and omnipresence of the East German surveillance state. The infamous "Stasi" -- "Ministerium für Staatssicherheit," or department of state security -- was ruthless, efficient, and perhaps above all else huge, with an estimated 91,000 employees by 1989 -- and an additional 100,000 informers on its rolls. Conceiving itself as the "sword and shield" of the state, the Stasi relied on intensive surveillance, lengthy interrogations, secret imprisonments, and that vast network of informants -- called "inoffizielle Mitarbeiter" or "IM": unofficial co-workers -- to suppress and deter political opposition.

Von Donnersmarck brings a humanistic sensibility to the story; indeed, he says the germ of the movie is not what those who've seen the movie might have expected. Instead, it's the playwright's moody, sad performance of a lovely piano piece on hearing of the death of a good friend -- with the Stasi agent listening in via bugs and electronic equipment. Turning to his girlfriend, the man asks, Could someone listening to such music -- really listening -- really be a bad person? That in turn was inspired by a story about Lenin related by Maxim Gorky; Lenin, said Gorky, once confessed that he was no longer willing to listen to Beethoven's "Appassionata," or he'd just be telling people loving banalities and stroking their heads, instead of pitilessly striking those heads to complete his revolution. Von Donnersmarck resolved to, in effect, force Lenin -- in the form of Stasi agent Wiesler -- to really listen to that music.

One might argue that's nice, but potentially also a weakness of the story. Would a top East German security agent really respond to the pathos of a piano piece quite the way Wiesler does? And so what if just one did?

Yet Von Donnersmarck's script and Mühe's acting at least make it plausible -- a lonely man, rather idealistic in his own way, gradually realizes he may have less in common with his bosses than with his surveillance targets. And I thought it was interesting to notice that Agent Wiesler -- in his capacity as an official of the surveillance state, to be sure -- is in fact strangely, breathtakingly free to observe, to draw his own conclusions, and then to act on them as he sees fit. Freedom's diminishment as a whole is achieved, in part, by giving people like Wiesler greater freedoms and greater powers -- powers that are generally abused as intended, but perhaps sometimes, very rarely, used differently as well. Freedom doesn't vanish completely -- it shrinks to the size of a headset.

Ulrich Mühe -- an East German actor who was himself surveilled, with his wife among the informants -- was interviewed for the German movie web site, and asked how he prepared himself for the movie. His answer: "I remembered." When asked whether the film succeeded in depicting an authentic picture of life in East Germany, Mühe replied:

In my opinion, absolutely. Althought the story is fictional, the film ... was able to evoke the climate of repression very exactly (meaning above all without exaggeration). Dictatorship feels like that.

My point with the news items at the top of this post is not to claim the United States is the same as East Germany, but to suggest that we're not different enough any more to suit me. (True, we have nowhere near the number of political informers in the US that East Germany could "boast" of, but we make up for that with any number of people who excuse and defend steps towards a surveillance state and away from liberty -- unofficial state security co-workers indeed.)

Once the Stasi was up and running, it was too late for East Germans to do more than grouse about it -- if they dared even do that. At the risk of sounding like Chicken Little or Cassandra, it's better to nip "Stasi"s in the bud -- restrict surveillance to the minimum necessary, prevent fishing expeditions or political abuse, insist on strict judicial and legislative oversight, resist expansions of state surveillance powers. In other words, we must remind ourselves that it is people, not governments, who are endowed with unalienable rights, and that governments are instituted merely to secure those rights -- not to suspend, abrogate, or diminish them.


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NOTES: Damian TPoD ("Danger West") was also impressed with the movie and points to a "Fresh Air" interview with director Von Donnersmarck on NPR; this is where I learned some of the background to the movie and about Mühe. For a couple of other worthwhile reviews of the movie see Roger Ebert and Anthony Lane.
EDIT, 3/26: "official" for "functionary," fifth paragraph.

UPDATES, 3/27: This post is included in a NYTimes "EmpireZone" blog roundup of blog responses to the Dwyer "City Police Spied Broadly..." article. Unofficial -- at least, so I assume -- state security co-workers commenting there say it's not so bad that police spied on demonstrators. (Ahead of a ruling party conference.) Also, in a second post Damian TPoD discusses the post reunification part of the movie -- which Von Donnersmarck had to argue to keep.
UPDATE, 5/15: Huh. Kevin Drum can't figure out why Wiesler might have protected his surveillance targets: "There was simply no serious motivation provided for this transformation. It was almost as if the writer figured he didn't really need to bother." I respond in comments. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:09:00 AM -- |