Alberto Gonzales is unacceptable as Attorney General for many reasons, but if you need it boiled down to one,
Chris Suellentrop identifies it:
Leahy's file may have been bursting with questions, but for most of Thursday's nearly nine-hour hearing the committee's Democrats wanted an answer to just one question: Does Gonzales think the president has the power to authorize torture by immunizing American personnel from prosecution for it?
During the hearing, Leahy called this idea, which comes from the August 2002 document dubbed the "Bybee memo," "the commander-in-chief override." And by hearing's end it was clear that Gonzales believed in it. (Otherwise, why not simply answer, "No"?) Early in the day, Gonzales professed the requisite faith that America was "a nation of laws and not of men," but his opinion of the president's ability--however limited--to authorize individuals to engage in criminal acts suggests the opposite. This is a government of good men, Gonzales implicitly assured the senators, so there's no need to worry about legal hypotheticals like whether torture is always verboten. Don't worry, because we don't do it. It's a strange argument from a conservative: We're the government. Trust us.
Well Mr. Gonzales, our Founding Fathers created a government designed on the principle that we can not trust anyone with absolute power. Justice Brandeis reminds us:
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent . . . The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
Olmstead v. U.S., 277 U.S. 438, 479 (Brandeis dissenting (1928).
Update [2005-1-7 16:37:41 by Armando]: For how the vote will go, it does not look good for a stop, or even for Dems holding the line. Sen. Schumer's position is particularly disappointing. He argues that because of the deference that is shown to Presidential Cabinet selections, a principle I agree with, he is likely to approve here, but that the standard for Supreme Court picks is much higher. While I understand his strategy, save your no votes for the big ones, this is an exception, torture is at issue - there will be no real negative fallout to no voting Gonzales - Schumer's position is an argument against filibuster, not against voting no. And a no vote now insulates from criticism a no vote later for a Gonzales appointment to the SCOTUS - God forbid.
Update [2005-1-7 17:32:22 by Armando]:WaPo also gets it:
At the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing on his nomination to be attorney general, Mr. Gonzales repeatedly was offered the chance to repudiate a legal judgment that the president is empowered to order torture in violation of U.S. law and immunize torturers from punishment. He declined to do so. He was invited to reject a 2002 ruling made under his direction that the infliction of pain short of serious physical injury, organ failure or death did not constitute torture. He answered: "I don't have a disagreement with the conclusions then reached." Nor did he condemn torture techniques, such as simulated drowning, that were discussed and approved during meetings in his office. "It is not my job," he said, to decide if they were proper. He was prompted to reflect on whether departing from the Geneva Conventions had been a mistake, in light of the shocking human rights abuses that have since been reported in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Guantanamo Bay prison and that continue even now. Mr. Gonzales demurred. The error, he answered, was not of administration policy but of "a failure of training and oversight."
The message Mr. Gonzales left with senators was unmistakable: As attorney general, he will seek no change in practices that have led to the torture and killing of scores of detainees and to the blackening of U.S. moral authority around the world. Instead, the Bush administration will continue to issue public declarations such as those Mr. Gonzales repeated yesterday -- "that torture and abuse will not be tolerated by this administration" -- while in practice sanctioning procedures that the International Red Cross and many lawyers inside the government consider to be illegal and improper.
. . . Mr. Gonzales appeared willfully obtuse about the consequences of his most important judgments as White House counsel. He repeatedly misrepresented the war crimes that have occurred, suggesting they were limited to those shown in the photographs taken by the "night shift" at Abu Ghraib, when it is now documented that abuses occurred throughout Iraq, in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo and that they continued even after the photos became public. He again derided and mischaracterized the Geneva Conventions, claiming that they "limit our ability to solicit information from detainees" and prevent their prosecution for war crimes -- an interpretation at odds with that of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the military's legal corps, the Red Cross, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and decades of U.S. experience in war.
. . . Those senators who are able to reach clear conclusions about torture and whether the United States should engage in it have reason for grave reservations about Mr. Gonzales.