Dean: Gonzales Will Stay On

By Scott Horton

Former presidential counsel John W. Dean reviews the Gonzales “reconfirmation” hearings in the current Findlaw. He considers Gonzales's performance to be the worst he's ever seen by an attorney general. But he predicts that Gonzales won't go and Bush won't fire him.

Notwithstanding the lack of support Gonzales has in the Congress, and the damage he is causing the Bush Administration, he is not going to resign, and Bush is not going to fire him. Rather, Bush is going to, in effect, create a new, and far lower, standard for acceptable conduct by attorneys general. Bush is openly embracing the “Peter Principle”—the management theory that says that, as people within an organization advance to their highest level of competence, they will then be further promoted to, and remain at, a level at which they are incompetent. This has clearly occurred with Alberto Gonzales.

I have varying degrees of knowledge about virtually all of the modern Attorneys General, or those who have served over the past five decades—the seventeen men and one woman who preceded Gonzales in the office he now occupies. They were all highly competent and able people. I cannot recall, nor find any evidence, that Congress ever questioned the competence of any of these former attorneys general. While Congress did not always agree with their policy decisions, no one thought these prior attorneys general were out of their league, nor that they were damaging the Justice Department by their inept management.

As a former Department of Justice official, I find what Bush and Gonzales are doing to this once proud and independent department quite sad.