Alberto Gonzales --- Is This The Best We Can Do?

People ask me, why don’t I join in the "victory?” Why don’t I join the Latinos across the United States who hail Gonzales’ appointment as a sign of how far we have come, how we finally have a place at the table. Because I refuse to overlook the glaring injustices in Gonzales’ record simply for the sake of putting a brown face in the White House. Because I don’t believe (as some groups have conceded) that Gonzales "is not nearly as bad as we might have expected." Because I want to believe that just policies, human rights, and due process are infinitely more important than playing the race card. This myopic view — that a Latino, any damn Latino, in the White House will trickle down to the rest of us — has allowed many to turn a blind eye to Gonzales’ track record on important legal issues. As a Latina, I feel my duty to my community is to do my homework — to understand just exactly what Alberto Gonzales will bring to the White House. In support of the Senate’s confirmation of Gonzales, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), said, "Judge Gonzales doesn't owe anybody an apology for his record, but some owe him an apology for rimracking him with phony allegations instead of honoring his willingness to serve his country." Sen. McConnell is correct; Gonzales doesn’t owe anyone an apology — he owes us an explanation. As Attorney General, Gonzales essentially represents the citizens of the United States. That includes me. I want Gonzales to explain how the legal reasoning he used in the January 2002 memo will translate to the policies he will set as our Attorney General. [more]

• Alberto Gonzales should not be U. S. Attorney General  [more]
• The Washington Times (2/4, Dinan) reports, "Michael McKenna, a Republican pollster who has surveyed Hispanics, said Republicans will be able to send home a strong message about the 36 Democrats who voted against Mr. Gonzales. 'Everywhere this guy goes now, he's going to be emblematic of Democratic hostility to Hispanics,' Mr. McKenna said." These rednecks really think people of color are stupid.
  
• Raul Reyes, an attorney in New York, writes in USA Today (2/4) , "I commend the 36 senators who voted against Gonzales. I question the leadership of the Latino groups who endorsed him. And I feel deeply cynical that the president's motives in selecting him were based on three L's: He's Loyal, he's Latino and he has a great Life story. That's not good enough." Gonzales' "top qualification for becoming attorney general, ultimately, was his ethnicity. This is tokenism at best, pandering at worst and not a compelling enough reason to have this brown guy lead the Justice Department of the United States."
• Mary Frances Berry on the Rice Appointment. "We have learned through experience that having diverse faces in high places doesn't really mean that the policy will be progressive and in our interests. So we've had to learn that, and now we know it. And the second thing is that the activities she engaged in, aside from foreign policy, such as mucking about in civil rights, advising the president in the Michigan affirmative action case not to support the university, mucking about in civil rights, telling a Washington Post magazine that she didn't have any civil rights heroes and questioning even whether Martin Luther King was hero; it's that sort of mucking about in things that weren't even in her foreign policy portfolio and saying things that seemed to reinforce a negative kind of civil rights policy that upset a lot of people and made it impossible for them to do what Dorothy Height said we should do, which is to smile when we heard that she had been made secretary of State. But I think that the secretary of State's job, whatever she thinks herself, is to reflect the president's foreign policy, and there's not doubt that she reflects Bush's policy."