Using DOJ As A Political Weapon - For Good

by Steve

There seems to be an emerging consensus that the purging of federal prosecutors was a Rove operation to use the Justice Department as a political arm of the RNC to destroy Democrats in battleground states. House Republicans circled the wagons in support of Alberto Gonzales last week, dismissing the accumulating evidence of lying to Congress and obstruction of justice as nothing more than a Democratic fishing expedition even before anyone heard a word from Monica Goodling. Some of these same House Republicans fully supported a multi-year $75 million fishing expedition of a failed Arkansas land deal and Bill Clinton’s sex life, but now don’t have time to be bothered by even the slightest indication that they have been lied to by DOJ and the White House.

Nonetheless, Democrats have succeeded in shining a bright light on what Rove and Gonzales were doing and have thrown a log onto the road in front of any further politicization of Justice for the remainder of Bush’s term. But since Republicans condone what Gonzales and Rove were doing as an acceptable use of federal prosecutors, they shouldn’t complain when a Hillary Clinton appoints dozens of partisan gunslingers around the country and turns them loose on the GOP vote stealing, voter disenfranchisement, computerized voting fraud, and vote ID transgressions that have piled up over the last seven years. The GOP has been shredding the Voting Rights Act for years, and now there should be a day of reckoning.

As I said previously, if Bush really wants to make an issue of voting fraud, Democrats should respond in kind. Once the prosecutor purge case has been fully exposed and Monica Goodling pressured to tell what she knows, Democrats should pivot and begin to use congressional hearings to document all of these GOP frauds and thefts from the 2000 Florida vote forward as a prelude to a new 2008 Voting Rights Act that would criminalize what the GOP has done with electronic voting and voter suppression tactics. And then when a Democratic president takes office in 2009, using the GOP rubber-stamping of what Gonzales and Rove were doing as a road map, the next AG should systematically use federal prosecutors to destroy the Republican Party.

If the Republicans want to condone what Rove did here, then they should feel the consequences. Payback is a bitch.