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Bush's Cabinet moves are about loyalty and control |
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By Josh Marshall
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Posted: 11/18/04 12:00 AM [ET] |
There were a few brave but naive souls who figured that President Bush would tack to the center after winning the last election of his lifetime. Others assumed he’d move unrestrainedly to the right, since he’ll never need to face voters again.
But a more discerning look at the flurry of firings and appointments over the past two weeks paints a different picture. The president isn’t moving to the right or the center and certainly not to the left. That’s the wrong metric: each new appointment is designed to assert more control and quiet dissident voices in the executive branch.
The president’s first term was defined by running battles between career “experts” at the various departments and agencies and political appointees with more doctrinaire and ideological viewpoints. Each new appointment is aimed at ending these quarrels by rooting out the intractables and placing those various departments and agencies more directly under the president’s control.
First, take Alberto Gonzales at Justice. Democrats will press several key points of criticism. Enron and Halliburton will come in for some pointed questions, and perhaps the Patriot Act, too. The most focused criticism will come for Gonzales’s role in okaying the orders and directives that led to the outrages at Abu Ghraib: By any reasonable measure, a lawyer who finds key aspects of the Geneva Conventions “obsolete … and quaint” isn’t fit to serve as AG.
But in truth Gonzales is no favorite of the right wing. If anything, conservatives find his appointment to Justice a source of relief because it seems to put him out of the running for a soon-to-open seat on the Supreme Court. Rather, what Gonzales brings to the job at Justice is reliability, absolute loyalty to Bush.
That quality will be particularly valued with the string of investigations under the new AG’s purview. Though none of them popped before the November election, there are still a slew of ongoing criminal investigations that could prove embarrassing to the administration.
First is the Plame investigation. But the list goes on from there. It includes the inquiry into Larry Franklin and possibly others at the Pentagon for providing classified intelligence to employees of American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and the investigation of Ahmed Chalabi and who provided him with highly classified U.S. intelligence he apparently passed on to the Iranians. And lest we forget, there is even the long-moribund investigation into who whipped up those forged Iraq-Niger uranium documents that played a role in driving the country to war.
Even setting aside these ongoing investigations, the second terms of the last three presidents lucky enough to win one (Nixon, Reagan and Clinton) have been beset by scandal. Having the man the president calls “mi abogado” running the show at Justice will let folks at the White House sleep a little easier.
Then there’s Condi Rice at the State Department. Once again, Rice is acceptable to administration hawks but hardly someone they consider one of their own. In her pre-George W. incarnation, she was known as a Realist in the mold of her one-time mentor Brent Scowcroft, though she’s abandoned most of those views over the past five years. Like Gonzales at Justice, Rice’s deciding qualification is loyalism. Like him, she has no real base or standing in Washington outside her connection to the president. Nor does it seem she would want one.
In the collective eyes of the Bush White House, the State Department and the entire foreign service has appeared disloyal and intractable — tendencies only aggravated by the leadership of Colin Powell, a man more personally popular than the president and one who never bought into the key principles of Bush administration foreign policy. By putting Condi in charge of State, the president has put the place under the control of someone who is defined by her loyalty to him.
At the State Department, and perhaps to a lesser degree at Justice, we can probably expect a repeat of the purge now underway at the CIA.
The modern presidency has a dual nature. There are the various Cabinet departments and agencies that perform the work of government. But over the past hundred years — and particularly over the past 50 — the White House has also built up a series of parallel institutions that do work similar to the various Cabinet departments but far more tightly and directly under the president’s control, and outside of congressional oversight. For State and Defense, there is the National Security Council; for Justice, the White House counsel’s office; for Treasury, the Office of Management and Budget; and so on down the list.
In the appointments of Gonzales and Rice, Bush has taken the person in charge of a given area of policy at the White House and given them direct control over the parallel executive-branch department. Late word that Bush has tapped his domestic policy adviser, Margaret Spellings, to head the Department of Education fits the pattern to a T.
Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week. E-mail:
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