Alberto Gonzales fails Civics 101

If you are a reader of political blogs, you will be able to find better analysis of Alberto Gonzales' time before the Senate panel elsewhere. I watched bits and pieces of it on C-Span, but I either missed the good stuff or wasn't really that impressed with the process. The Republican Senator from Texas, however, seemed pretty smug as he seemed to argue for torture, though.

Anyway, since he's going to make it through, and a number of Democrats will vote for him, there really wasn't much drama. But this was an interesting argument for Gonzales to make:

Gonzales told the senators that whether the president can issue orders that run counter to U.S. laws or international treaties is "a very, very difficult question" but not one he would reject out of hand.

To Bush administration opponents, that sounds like Gonzales will simply be a quieter version of current Attorney General John Ashcroft, who has been targeted for frequent criticism by legal experts, civil liberties groups and immigration advocates for heavy-handed - some say flatly unconstitutional - tactics in the war on terror.

"Any law student in the United States could tell you that the president can't simply choose to ignore the laws passed by Congress. That's Civics 101," said Deborah Pearlstein, director of the U.S. law and security program at Human Rights First, a nonprofit advocacy group.

The Justice Department's willingness to entertain legal theories that reach the edges of the Constitution, coupled with Gonzales' views on presidential authority, also raise concern in the minds of some people that the new attorney general might acquiesce to unwise White House decisions instead of opposing them.

Gonzales also said at one point that his job was to tailor the law to suit what the President wanted to do rather than argue whether what Bush intended was lawful or not to begin with. If he takes that attitude to the Attorney General's office, there will be a whole new level of disgust building with the White House.

*UPDATE* Heh. As I finished this, the National Review tries to defend torture by pointing out we train our own boys by performing it on them. I remember one of the special witnesses pointed out to the Senate panel that if we are training our boys to resist, then no doubt our enemy will train their "soldiers" to do the same, thereby rendering torture worthless.