DAngelus asks "Did Keith Olbermann go "centrist" all of a sudden?" and one of two reasons in the diary is because Olberman cited Holder's dismissal of charges against Ted Stevens as a good thing:
isn't the point that whatever he did, whether misdemeanor or felony or a slap on the wrist subject, it's almost beside the point when there's misconduct like this in a democratic system of justice? There's no choice, right? You don't withhold evidence from the defense, no matter what."
DAngelus is certainly right that there's more to the issue than just the prosecutorial misconduct. There is still the matter of Stevens being a crook. But what's the bigger issue here, particularly given the scope of prosecutorial misconduct over the last 8 years?
Don Siegelman has some thoughts on this, according to TPM::
"There seems to be substantial evidence of prosecutorial and other misconduct in my case, that would dwarf the allegations in the Stevens case," the former Alabama governor told TPMmuckraker in an interview moments ago....
And, as he has before, Siegelman framed his case as part of a wider effort to get to truth about politicization of the Justice Department during the Bush years. "Who at the Department of Justice abused their power, and why?" he asked. "Was Karl Rove directing the show?"
Even bigger than the issue of prosecutorial misconduct, however, is the over-arching issue of restoring the rule of law. As in holding Bush Administration officials accountable for torture, and other criminal policies.
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| I'm hardly suggesting that this is where Holder wants to go. Rather, it just could turn out that this is where Holder will feel constrained and compelled to go. Dismissing the case against Stevens sent a clear message of a fundamental break with the Bush DOJ's practices. It is holding the government lawyers to a higher standard--just as they should be. And what follows logically from that is holding them to a higher standard across the board.
We are a nation of laws, not men. That is the message that Holder sent, with a big "No kidding!" tacked onto the end, in case there was any doubt. That's a very important message, because it's so central to what made the United States so special in the first place. Other nations had laws--Britain certainly did. But they still placed some men above the law. We pledged ourselves not to do that, and constructed our Constitution on that basis. In that sense, the Bush Adminstration's attack on the rule of law was its most fundamentally anti-American act, and its most in need of utter and thorough repudiation.
To date, Obama has framed this in political terms--"looking backwards" and continuing "partisan division." But this is an utterly politicized, utterly corrupt way of misrepresenting the ideal of some things, such as justice, transcending the realm of politics. Holders act in dismissing the Stevens case holds out the potential promise of righting the wrong interpretation that Obama has embraced so far, while still maintaining some continuity with Obama's political intent: by making a high-ranking Republican the first beneficiary of his housecleaning of the Bush-era horrors, Holder gives a nod to Obama's desire not to make this a partisan matter.
Holder can continue in this vein by tapping Patrick Fitzgerald as special prosecutor to get to the bottom of all the high-level Bush-era crimes. What's more, he can take advantage of Spain's initiation of legal actions against high-level Bush officials for torture by initiating such actions himself, in giving Fitzgerald his brief. Such an action would be grounds for Spain to abandon its investigation, which Holder could clearly and honestly portray as an act of patriotically taking responsibility for our own housecleaning.
This is what Holder could do, and it is what he should be pressed to do. Normally, it is conservatives who insist on the importance of the rule of law, it matters much more than democracy, so far as they are concerned. Orderly societies with harsh punishments and no elections seldom draw any complaints from them. Now, however, the rule of law has become firmly associated with the DFHs--at least, in the mind of Versailles. Nothing could do a better job of changing that than consistent conduct from the Attorney General. Consistent with the dismissal of the Steven's indictment, that is. |
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