Bush found someone worse than Ashcroft to take over the Attorney General's post. Ashcroft was just an ultrafundie loon, but Gonzales appears to be partisan to as great a degree as anyone in the Bush administration. Ashcroft could go off on his own tangents. Gonzales, I expect will take orders and gladly ignore the law when it suits the Party. He's also one of the guys ultimately responsible for the widespread torture conducted by the US military under Bush, having sent around memos declaring it acceptable back around the Afghan campaign.
Here's an informative article about Gonzales.
Tapping Gonzales for AG means that we'll probably see an attempt to put Miguel Estrada on the Supreme Court. Like Gonzales, Estrada lets the Republicans play the race card and accuse anyone opposing him for his deeds of opposing him for being Hispanic, something they already did with great success when they floated Estrada for the DC circuit. Estrada has two other attributes which make him likely to slide into the Supreme Court with little effort.
First, he has very little background on which to judge him. I've mentioned the time he took up a case against a union and argued that the Seventh Amendment shouldn't be respected. Other than that, there's not much else in the way of information on Estrada, pro or con. It's difficult to read him other than to hear Ann Coulter promise that he'll use his powers to destroy everything that liberals have ever believed in.
Secondly, Estrada has relevant experience working as a staffer for Justice Kennedy. He's been in the building, which is a big step forward in getting the post. I've heard that his job was to filter out liberal arguments so that Kennedy would never have the chance of reading one where he might accidentally agree with it. I'm a little too busy to dig us anything on it right now.
Posted by Warrior Tang at November 10, 2004 03:22 PM