February 1, 2005 - Senator Hatch says that Alberto Gonzales is being made a scapegoat for a few renegade soldiers who mistreated prisoners in Abu Ghraib. Has Orrin just awakened from a 6 month nap? Obviously he hasn’t listened to the news or read a newspaper since Abu Ghraib was impressed on the national conscience. Revelation of the widespread use of torture wherever enemy combatants are held seems to have eluded him as he considers this nomination as he repeats the now thoroughly discredited “few renegade soldiers” excuse. Judge Gonzales is not being made a scapegoat. He is being recognized for his accomplishment as one of the primary architects and defenders of the policies that made the abuses possible at Abu Ghraib, Camp Delta, Bagram Air Base and a dozen other locations.

Senator Hatch says that Judge Gonzales’ Hispanic background makes him the more sensitive in the area of civil rights. That may come as a surprise to Jose Padilla, the Hispanic-American whose incommunicado confinement without charge is reaching into its third year. The suggestion, of course, is that Democratic opposition to confirmation of Alberto Gonzales as the cabinet officer charged with protecting our most basic rights and privileges is based upon his ethnicity. After all he would be the nations first Hispanic-American to hold the office of Attorney General. That is, say Senators Hatch and Spector, quite significant. Ignore his role in crafting the prisoner abuse policies carefully crafted in his White House office. Ignore his role in fashioning the Patriot Abuse Act that degraded our liberties. Focus only on his background and inspiring rise from the Texas barrios, they say.

Democrats don’t oppose Alberto Gonzales’ nomination because of his Hispanic heritage. Democrats oppose his confirmation because his record demonstrates that he neither understands nor appreciates the importance of the quaint and outmoded Constitution of the United States and its guarantees of our civil liberties. Democrats oppose him because he can be counted on to be in the forefront of further erosion of our Constitutional protections against the tyranny of arbitrary executive and military power and not in the defense of the peoples’ liberty to be let alone by their government. Democrats oppose confirmation of his nomination because Judge Gonzales is consistently wrong.

This nomination is emblematic of the Republican Parties capture by the Radical Right. Senators whose records have been written over decades of service dedicated to the protection of our American heritage have abandoned those principals to vocally support this nomination of a primary architect of the destruction of those principles. The Radical Right in their zeal to transmogrify the liberal democracy that the Founding Fathers erected into an authoritarian structured society have co-opted and coerced the rational voices of reason and classical conservatism with in the Republican ranks. Now the pillars of that party rest only on the extreme right. The Republican Party has become the party of the Right and for America, oh so Wrong.