Did you know that Mitch McConnell, Trent Lott, Newt Gingrich, and Orrin Hatch all have a very low threshold for politicization and incompetency in the Department of Justice? Even the appearance of such.
In President Clinton's Department of Justice, that is.
Mitch McConnell wanted to impeach Janet Reno because she refused to appoint an independent counsel to investigate the accusation that Clinton and Gore had used the wrong phone for some of their fundraising calls.
Trent Lott called for Reno to resign because of "her refusal to provide information or answer questions by the Congress."
And Newt Gingrich, the man who shut down the federal government because President Clinton made him sit in the back of Air Force One, called for Reno's resignation because "she looks like a fool."
After the Jump: More Republican hypocrisy gone wild...and Orrin Hatch shows himself to be a partisan hack. Shocking, huh?
In an October 1997 column, the inestimable Molly Ivins called out congressional Republicans:
How silly can this get? Republicans are now threatening to impeach Attorney General Janet Reno because she has so far not named a special prosecutor to look into whether President Clinton broke a law written in 1883 — which was intended to prevent another problem entirely — by making fund-raising phone calls from one room in the White House instead of another that might be legal if the calls raised soft money but not hard money. Is all that perfectly clear?
House Speaker Newt Gingrich made the astonishing suggestion that Reno resign because "she looks like a fool." If everyone in Washington had to resign when he or she looked like a fool, the vacancy rate would be astronomical and Gingrich would be long gone. The only people who looked like fools last week were the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee trying to bully and stampede Reno. What a hopeless endeavor that was.
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott sneeringly referred to her as "Gen. Stonewall Reno"
[...]
Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, leader of the anti-reform faction on campaign finance, now threatens to impeach Reno for not acting on Clinton's phone calls. And this is the same McConnell who, according to some media reports, urged the Senate Ethics Committee not to pursue Sen. Phil Gramm for having made fund-raising calls from his office on the grounds that so many other senators were probably guilty of the same thing.
Republicans who were aghast that Clinton and Gore may have used the wrong phones for their fundraising calls don't seem at all perturbed over the current White House e-mail scandal. And who knew that Mr. Lott was bothered by an Attorney General stonewalling a congressional investigation. Of course, the stonewalling that Lott referred to in Reno's case was an unwillingness on the part of the AG to allow congress to dictate how she ran DOJ investigations. He is apparently not bothered by an AG who stonewalls the Senate Judiciary by answering "I don't recall" to every other question.
Trent Lott, Senate majority leader at the time, had a number of reasons he thought Reno must go:
While Lott said that Congress may need to "issue subpoenas in order to find out the truth," he suggested the broader question may be Reno's continuing ability to serve as attorney general.
"I think the attorney general is falling into a pattern of not showing competence or probity," Lott said yesterday.
"It's based on the pattern now that has developed over 6 1/2 years and the events involving the appointment of independent counsels, her refusal to provide information or answer questions by the Congress, the problem with the Waco investigation," Lott said. "All of that leads me to conclude that the attorney general should resign."
You'd think that Mr. Lott would have been livid this week over Gonzales' testimony (or lack of testimony). Strangely, though, I was unable to find any comment. But Lott did appear on FOX a couple of weeks ago as a Bush administration apologist, exclaiming in mock concern, "Horror of horrors!" that U.S. Attorneys were fired for political reasons. It wasn't so long ago that Bush and Rove worked to have Lott removed as Senate majority leader. By-gones, I guess. Apparently, Trent Lott enjoys being Karl Rove's lackey.
And then there's Orrin Hatch. Even in Washington D.C., there are few that can compete with Hatch's lack of principles and rank hypocrisy.
Orrin Hatch thought that Clinton should have fired Attorney General Janet Reno for being too aggressive in the FBI's raid on religious extremists who were stockpiling weapons in Waco, Texas. Hatch said this even though Republican John Danforth's investigation cleared Reno of any wrong-doing.
And it seemed Hatch was very concerned about the politics of Clinton's DOJ appointees. He, in fact, opposed Clinton's nomination of Bill Lann Lee to head the DOJ's Civil Rights division because of Lee's "personal viewpoints" on affirmative action (supporting it). Funny, I must have missed Hatch's outrage over the insertion of "loyal Bushies" at Justice and throughout the federal government. Kind of makes his concern over affirmative-action policy seem quaint.
To top it off, Hatch should be truly embarrassed by what Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has unearthed. John Dean explains:
In a premise to a question for Gonzales, Senator Whitehouse said he had found correspondence in the files of the Senate Judiciary Committee from the days when Orrin Hatch was chairman relating to an investigation of the relationship between the Clinton White House and the Justice Department (under Attorney General Janet Reno). Hatch was concerned about the independence of the Department of Justice, so he wanted to know who in the White House could speak with whom in the Justice Department. The correspondence showed that four people in the White House (the President, Vice President, chief of staff, and White House counsel) could speak with three people in the Justice Department (the Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney and the Associate Attorney General) - period.
Senator Whitehouse discovered - and created a chart to make the point - that in the Bush White House, a shocking 417 people could speak with 30 different people in the Justice Department. It was a jaw-dropper. As Chairman Leahy said, when he asked Senator Whitehouse to continue when his time expired, in his thirty years on the Judiciary Committee, he had never seen anything like the open contacts from the White House to the Justice Department that had occurred in the Bush Administration.
What a piece of work Orrin Hatch is.
With this kind of blatant hypocrisy from GOP leaders, and the inevitable lack of opposition to Bush's continued support of Gonzales, it almost seems like congressional Republicans are begging to remain in the minority for years to come.
cross-posted at ProgressiveHistorians