Monday, June 11, 2007

53-38 VOTE BY CONGRESS AGAINST ALBERTO GONZALES - IN NO-CONFIDENCE VOTE - NOT ENOUGH TO BRING TO A FINAL BINDING VOTE











Last week's "incompetent" no confidence vote on Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General was just another sign that the Democrats don't have their own house in order. They had 7 Republicans voting with them but they also had some yellow-dog democrat defectors and in the end could only muster a 53-38 vote majority, short of the 60 votes necessary to bring this matter to a final binding vote before the full Senate.

It doesn't help when your side is already missing 3 senators who are away doing some presidential campaigning [Joe Biden, Christopher Dodd, Barak Obama]. This is precisely what is meant about not having your "house in order." It also doesn't help when you have another Democratic senator laid up in intensive care, too weak to cast a vote [Tim Johnson].

Still that would have only resulted in 57 votes on the Democratic side - still 3 short of the necessary 60.

So after all is said and done it's those damn "yellow-dog" [yellow belly] Democrats who joined in with the Republicans to produce enough votes to thwart the efforts by the Democrats to bring this matter to a final full Senate floor vote. Up or down. Gonzales stays --- or Gonzales goes!

The evidence is overwhelming that this cretin is by any measure of decency or civility not fit to serve in this office - either by the letter of the law or its true spirit. If he had any class at all he would have departed long ago. If he was the usual Bush appointee he would have been sacked [but loyalty - like former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil remarked in his book - "The Price of Loyalty" --- has its privileges].

So here we are with a situation where the chief law enforcement officer of this country was engaged in an outright purge in the U.S. Attorney's Office of highly competent professional civil servants only to be replaced with administration apparatchicks intent on guaranteeing a Republican presidential victory in 2008 by virtue of their respective swing-state jurisdictions. There have been 9 U.S. Attorneys replaced under this Bush toady and evidence suggests that the number originally contemplated for purging was as high as 25.

Now to top all of this Gonzales himself is being looked into by an in-house Department of Justice investigatory unit. The latest concern is Gonzales' conversation with the recently departed Monica Goodling [former Justice Department official] wherein he seemed to be "coaching" Ms. Goodling on just how uninvolved he really was as Attorney General in this whole Attorney-Gate scandal.

So many scandals, so little time.

Bring on Impeachment!

No comments: