Robert Kuttner: Impeach Gonzales

[Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a fellow at Demos. His column appears regularly in the Globe. ]

THE HOUSE of Representatives should begin impeachment proceedings against Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Gonzales, the nation's highest legal officer, has been point man for serial assaults against the rule of law, most recently in the crude attempt to politicize criminal prosecutions. Obstruction of a prosecution is a felony, even when committed by the attorney general....

But can the House impeach the attorney general? The Constitution is clear that Congress may impeach "all civil officers of the United States." In our history, the House has impeached two presidents, and just one member of the Cabinet, William Belknap, secretary of war under president Ulysses S. Grant.

Belknap had profited from kickbacks by military contractors. The House began impeachment proceedings, documented the charges, and just before the articles were formally voted, on March 2, 1876, Belknap resigned. But the House voted impeachment anyway. The reason, as House Judiciary Chairman J. Proctor Knott explained to the Senate, "was that his infamy might be rendered conspicuous, historic, eternal, in order to prevent the occurrence of like offenses in the future."

A fine discussion of the Belknap precedent was written last December on the legal website findlaw.com, by, of all people, President Nixon's former legal counsel John Dean. (Astoundingly, the best lawyer the Bush White House can find for advice on stonewalling is another Watergate veteran, Fred Fielding.)
And speaking of Nixon, there's another reason to impeach Gonzales. Though the assaults on the Constitution by Bush and Cheney surely rise to impeachable offenses, the Democratic leadership has been loath to use the impeachment process. The fear is that partisan polarization, so close to the end of Bush's term, would overshadow the issues.

But now, the offenses of a Cabinet member criticized by both parties, and the stonewalling by the White House, have given ample justification. It's time for an impeachment, not just to oust Gonzales, but as a salutary warning to his superiors.