Senate Passes Bill Revoking Gonzales' Authority to Hire New Prosecutors

Posted on March 20, 2007

Today the Senate overwhelmingly passed a bill that repealed the portions of the Patriot Act which gave the Attorney General the power to appoint new attorneys general without a confirmation hearing. In effect, the bill put the law back to where it was before the Patriot Act was enacted. The portion of the Patriot Act in question was just another of those little zingers that were slipped into massive piece of legislation that was enacted in panic right after 9/11.

[T]he Senate by a 94-2 vote passed a bill that would cancel the attorney general's power to appoint U.S. attorneys without Senate confirmation. Democrats say the Bush administration abused that authority when it fired the eight prosecutors and proposed replacing some with White House loyalists.
"If you politicize the prosecutors, you politicize everybody in the whole chain of law enforcement," said Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (news, bio, voting record), D-Vt.
The bill, which has yet to be considered in the House, would set a 120-day deadline for the administration to appoint an interim prosecutor. If the interim appointment is not confirmed by the Senate in that time, a permanent replacement would be named by a federal district judge. Essentially, the Senate returned the law regarding the appointments of U.S. attorneys to where it was before Congress passed the Patriot Act, including the unilateral appointment authority the administration had sought in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks.
The vote came as Gonzales and the White House braced for more fallout from the firings. The White House also denied reports that it was looking for possible successors for Gonzales. "Those rumors are untrue," White House deputy press secretary Dana Perino said.

Dana Perino can talk all she likes, but the short list of nominees to replace Gonzales is already circulating. Gonzales is on the plank and is slowly being prodded forward to his political demise. We'll see how that plays politically if the first Latino Attorney General becomes yet another casualty of the White House's cavalier disregard for the law.