Senate confirmation hearings promise drama

Tom Curry National affairs writer • Profile • E-mail

WASHINGTON - Dramatic enough in itself, the announcement Monday morning that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had resigned also set the stage for what may be one of most contentious confirmation hearings since the Senate rejected John Tower as defense secretary in 1989.

Tower’s defeat at the hands of a Democratic-controlled Senate was the last time any president has had a Cabinet nominee voted down, an event that has happened only 12 times since the republic began.

Will the Senate, which the Democrats control by a one-seat margin, be able to impose a consensus nominee on President Bush, someone in the mold of Sen. William Saxbe, R-Ohio, whom Richard Nixon was virtually forced to appoint in the depths of the Watergate crisis?

Weakened after the 1973 Saturday Night Massacre in which he ordered the dismissal of the special prosecutor, triggering the resignation of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy, Nixon had to come up with a nominee the Democratic Senate majority could accept.

Only once has the Senate rejected one of its own members as a Cabinet or Supreme Court nominee, that one being Tower.

Chance for Biden to shine
As for the implications for the 2008 campaign, only one Democratic presidential contender serves on the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, who so often in the past has played a high-profile role in confirmation hearings, from Robert Bork in 1987 to Samuel Alito last year.

The hearings on the new attorney general will be a chance for Biden to serve as advocate of Democratic principles and to display his abilities as an interrogator.

Denver-based Democratic strategist/blogger David Sirota said the hearings on the new attorney general will be an opportunity for Democrats "to highlight how the Constitution has been trampled by the Bush administration, and how that should be a concern not just to Democratic base voters but to all Americans."

He added, "What Washington Republicans seem not to understand is that when the Bush administration lays waste to such core principles as privacy, civil liberties and freedom, they give Democrats an opportunity to go on the offensive with libertarian-leaning conservative voters in traditionally Republican areas like the Mountain West."

NBC News video Gonzales analysis Aug. 28: Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer and commentator James Carville talk about the resignation of Alberto Gonzales. Today show

As to the question of who would be willing to take on what appears to be a hazardous political mission, surviving confirmation and running a beleaguered Justice Department, former Republican senators, such as Mike DeWine and Jim Talent, are available.

"We're willing to bury the gauntlet as long as the White House meets us part of the way," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., a Judiciary Committee member and the third-ranking Democrat in the party's Senate leadership.

"If the president nominates an attorney general who puts rule of law first and that attorney general will say 'Let's find out what went wrong, let's correct it and let's move on,' he will find a welcoming hand from the Congress," Schumer told reporters Monday.

But Schumer said probes, including the investigations of Gonzales' role in Bush administration policies such as the National Security Agency surveillance program, would "have to continue" even with the exit of Gonzales.

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