With the welcome news that Alberto Gonzales has resigned, speculation turns to his replacement as Attorney General. The Associated Press and Fox News speculate that Solicitor General Paul Clement will be either the temporary or permanent replacement [UPDATE 11:54AM ET: Bush just announced that Clement "has agreed to serve as temporary Attorney General until a replacement has been confirmed by the Senate." No word on if Clement's acting designation precludes him from being a nominee for the permanent job, assuming he doesn't simply serve as acting AG without confirmation.], begging the questions of who is Paul Clement and would a Justice Department under his watch be as systematically corrupted as Gonzales's Justice Department has been?
Paul Clement has served for the past two years as Solicitor General. From his official biography:
Mr. Clement is a native of Cedarburg, Wisconsin, and a graduate of the Cedarburg public schools. He received his bachelor’s degree summa cum laude from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, and a master’s degree in economics from Cambridge University. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School where he was the Supreme Court editor of the Harvard Law Review.
Like Gonzales, Clement is a Harvard product, not a Regent product. That distinguishes him from many of the DOJ hires over the past couple of years.
Following graduation, Mr. Clement clerked for Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and for Associate Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court. After his clerkships, he worked as an associate in the Washington, D.C., office of Kirkland & Ellis. Mr. Clement went on to serve as Chief Counsel of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, Federalism and Property Rights.
Silberman and Scalia? Doesn't get much more right wing than that in the federal court system. With that background, you might think Clement was a member of the Federalist Society. (And you would be right.) How did he join the Department of Justice?
Mr. Clement joined the Department of Justice in February of 2001. Before his confirmation as Solicitor General, he served as Acting Solicitor General for nearly a year and as Principal Deputy Solicitor General. He has argued over 40 cases before the United States Supreme Court, including McConnell v. FEC, Tennessee v. Lane, Rumsfeld v. Padilla, United States v. Booker and Gonzales v. Raich. He also argued many of the key cases in the lower courts involving challenges to the President’s conduct of the war on terrorism.
Acting SG for nearly a year -- a typical Bush gambit to put objectionable appointees in office. The focus on terrorism is from his official biography -- the Padilla case is a source of pride here.
So, a Federalist Society member who is a cheerleader on the War on Terror. That's bad, but not surprising for a Bush appointee. He is, however, a Harvard Law graduate, so maybe he at least is interested in staffing Justice with the best and brightest, right? A Clement Justice Department would break from Gonzales's practice of filling the ranks with Regent graduates who take oaths to the president rather than the nation?
Think again. From Talking Points Memo this past April:
Since the U.S. attorney scandal implicates practically the whole of the Justice Department's leadership, the reins have been passed to Paul Clement, the Solicitor General, who's now in charge of how the department handles things.
So it was apparently his call to keep Monica Goodling on the payroll even after she'd pleaded the Fifth. That's a good start.
That's not all. Again from TPM, we find that
he's supervising the Department's joint investigation into the firings by the Office of Professional Responsibility and Inspector General, and he's in charge of which documents are doled over to Congress and which aren't.
In other words, Clement is not only part of the culture that's stonewalling inquiries into DOJ, he's an architect. Clement would bring the same lack of institutional respect to the position of Attorney General that Gonzales did, and he's proven it by being a loyal builder of the current Justice Department the past two years. On the other hand, for Bush, he's a great improvement over Gonzales as he does not have a record of systemic, childish lying to Congress and the American people. It would take several months for Clement to build up the levels of disgust amongst the public that Gonzales did...and this administration could go on doing the same things for several months under Clement before investigations would be academic exercises. Running the clock out, just like in Iraq. All of Bush's policy now is designed to cover his ass until January 2009. Clement is a good appointee if you are using those hiring criteria.
He has already proven objectionable enough as an appointee to be Acting Solicitor General for a year...and now he may become Acting Attorney General in August...when the Senate is in recess?
The timing of Gonzales's resignation is almost as if he had planned this exit to give Bush the chance to install Clement as a recess appointment, reneging on Bush's agreement with Harry Reid. It's almost uncanny.