Impeach Gonzales

Frank Bowman lays out the case for how this could be done:

Showing that Gonzales knew that the only real reasons for dismissing Iglesias were improper ones is critical to the case for impeaching the attorney general. Remarkably, Gonzales has effectively admitted as much. In his testimony, Gonzales provided three explanations for his decision to fire Iglesias: 1) Iglesias "lost the confidence of Senator Domenici," 2) Karl Rove and President Bush complained, and 3) "the consensus recommendation of the senior leadership."

When the attorney general of the United States penalizes his subordinates for not breaking the law, the administration that doesn't fire him has no credibility to govern.

Meanwhile, the ever brilliant Dahlia Lithwick explains that it's not a non-issue but a matter of serious interpretation whether the Department of Justice ought to have signed off on the NSA's surveillance program:

There is a normative legal argument about whether the president should need any permission to do anything in wartime. The bloggers above agree that this bare assertion—that the president's Article II powers allow him to do what needs doing—appears to be the basis for the work of John Yoo, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyer who laid much of the legal groundwork for torture and other forms of unchecked executive power before 2004. That may, in turn, have been the basis for the apparently rigorous re-evaluation of Yoo's legal work by the new head of OLC, Jack Goldsmith. (Disclosure: Goldsmith and I have co-authored here in Slate.)

But regardless of what the [Wall Street] Journal claims, Comey was not this week endorsing the assertion that whatever the president says goes. He conceded that the attorney general's certification was not required by statute or by regulation, but it was "the practice in this particular [surveillance] program … there was a signature line for that." And he added that the AG's certification had never yet been disregarded.

Consider how dire the situation has become. The U.S. president has, by his own passivity and failure to uphold the laws of his own office, effectively become a lame duck while a savage war still rages in Mesopotamia. It's a sign of just how low his concern for Iraq is, and probably always has been, that he continually fritters away his domestic political capital, making his foreign policy another casualty of his overall bankruptcy.  2008 can't come soon enough.