The coming battle over Gonzales' replacement

We are at the moment waiting for the official announcement of Albert Gonzales' resignation as U.S. Attorney General.

There is going to be a big battle over his replacement. Bush is going to try to appoint someone who will attempt to apply conservative ideology in the way I just described in my post "Conservatism failed? Do it again with twice the effort. (Failure assured.)" This will be the conservative ideologue who will be supported by the Republican Party and a few conservative Democrats.

The Democrats will demand a replacement who will enforce the law and the Constitution rather than enforce conservative ideology.

No one can satisfy both requirements.

NPR just speculated that the two current front running choices are Michael Chertoff, presently Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and Paul D. Clement, currently Department of Justice Solicitor General.

Both are conservative ideologues before they are lawyers. Neither is likely to actually investigate the warrantless wiretaps or the reasons why the US Attorneys were purged on Pearl Harbor Day, 2006. If they follow the Bush administration tradition they will lie to the Senate (as did Justices Alito and Roberts) and then do as they wish

Two other possible names according to Daniel Metcalf (interviewed on NPR) are Sen. Orrin Hatch and ex-Sen. John Danforth. Metcalf suggests that each has an "in" for confirmation by the Senate since they are both members of the Senate club. The drawback for Sen. Hatch is that he has been a vigorous, but that Sen. Hatch has has spent a great deal of his legitimacy by defending Gonzales so strongly. Ex-Sen. Danforth, as a confirmed Episcopal Priest, should be able to politically get past the problems created by Gonzales' many "I don't know"'s and misleading statements to the Senate during hearings.

There will be other names floated in the near future.

Of course, there is also the problem of the jelly-spined Democrats currently dominating Washington D.C. They will try to get binding commitments from whoever the nominee is. Will they hear what they want to hear and roll over?

Still, the only place the Bush administration is going to be able to effectively push their idea of conservatism is in foreign policy. That means that America can expect to see more self-destructive foreign policy initiatives over the next 17 months.

I do predict that Bush 43 will start something risky and ill-advised in foreign policy after the November 2008 election and hand it off to his successor. That is what Eisenhower did with the Bay of Pigs, handing it off the John Kennedy, and it is what Bush 41 did with his actions in Somalia in 1992, handing that mess off the Bill Clinton.