Après moi, le deluge

By Scott Horton

So why doesn’t Alberto Gonzales just resign? The Boston Globe tells us that the game is all about Karl Rove—by holding on, Gonzales moves the spotlight off Rove and helps assure his political survival. That’s a reasonable analysis. But in today’s Los Angeles Times, former prosecutor and Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman has a different take.

No matter how many members of Congress lose confidence in Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales, President Bush is unlikely to let him go. If Gonzales resigns, the vacancy must be filled by a new presidential nominee, and the last thing the White House wants is a confirmation hearing.

Already, the Senate is outlining conditions for confirming a Gonzales successor. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has said that his panel would not hold confirmation hearings unless Karl Rove and other White House aides testify about the firing of U.S. attorneys to clarify whether "the White House has interfered with prosecution."

The problem is what those hearings and that process might unleash. At this point, the White House and Gonzales know much better than we do. But the discovery yesterday of a secret memorandum giving two young political hacks with close ties to Karl Rove the power to carry out a full-scale purge in the Justice Department with the authority of the attorney general is extreme telling. In the end, the decision for Gonzales to hold over sends a clear signal. It

exacts a high price for the Justice Department and the nation. It damages department morale and credibility, undermines its ability to recruit and could affect perceptions of federal prosecutors, jeopardizing important cases. By retaining Gonzales to preempt Senate action, the president has signaled that this is a price he is willing to make the nation pay.

“Après moi, le deluge,” as Louis XV said. Is this not the attitude that Holtzman is trying to capture? Or even better this passage of Seneca’s de clementia, written by the master to his good-for-nothing student Nero, the man who played his lyre as Rome burned,

I hear the people regurgitate the expressions of a pompous and arrogant few and by their repetition are the expressions not falsely taken for wisdom? For instance, they say ‘Let them hate me, so long as they fear me,’ or as the Greeks have it, ‘once I am dead, let the earth mix with fires for all I care.’ And in this they show their contempt and distance from humanity and the absence of what is noble. For what purpose has a life if not to uphold the noble things that were passed to us, to secure them for those who follow?

What purpose indeed.