- The following was written for the L.A. Weekly, where
it will be posted Wednesday evening and in print on Thursday.
-
- The Bush White House thinks they're being clever by naming
a prosecutor instead of a criminal to head the Department of Homeland Security:
Mike Chertoff, whose appointment as DHS czar in the wake of the failed
nomination of scandal-plagued Bernie Kerik (now under investigation by
multiple law-enforcement agencies) was announced as the Weekly went to
press. But Chertoff is as political an appointment as one can imagine--especially
for those who know the arcana of politics in New Jersey, where Chertoff
was U.S. Attorney, and where his naming to the DHS job caused jaws to drop.
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- Chertoff was a political attack dog in that job, indicting
and convicting a raft of Democratic officeholders. But one who Chertoff
deliberately let get away was his big buddy, Bob "The Torch Torricelli,
forced to resign his U.S. Senate seat from Sopranoland in a major corruption
scandal. Nick Acocella, editor of the respected insider newsletter New
Jersey Politifax, recalls that, at the height of the Torricelli scandal,
and while Chertoff was U.S. Attorney, he saw The Torch and Chertoff together
at a South Jersey Jewish banquet where they embraced and huddled intimately
"like twins separated at birth. One would have thought a federal prosecutor
would have kept his distance from a target of criminal investigations that
were making daily headlines in the Jersey press.
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- When Chertoff was named by Bush to head the Justice Department's
Criminal Division--partly because he was a skilled political hitman, who,d
also raised a ton of money as financial vice-chair of Bush's Garden State
campaign in 2000-- it's an open secret in Jersey that he squelched an indictment
of Torricelli as a reward for The Torch's support of key Bush legislation
the Democratic Party leadership opposed, including tax cuts for corporations
and the very rich. (Many of the fat-cats Chertoff shook down for Bush had
also been huge givers to The Torch.)
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- Long active in the Federalist Society--a conspiratorial
brotherhood of legal reactionaries--Chertoff, at Justice, helped to write
the civil liberties-shredding Patriot Act. He was John Ashcroft's honcho
in the indiscriminate grilling of over 5000 Arab-Americans after 9/11,
cooked up the use of "material witness warrants to lock up people
of Middle Eastern descent and hold them indefinitely without trial, and
on behalf of the Justice Department wrote a brief (in Chavez v. Martinez)
arguing there was no Constitutional right to be free of coercive police
questioning.
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- Moreover, Chertoff wrote legislation, known as the Feeney
Amendment, which gutted federal sentencing guidelines -- under which federal
judges were allowed to use some discretion when sentencing criminal defendants
-- by preventing judges from shortening sentences--and, worse, required
judges who deviated from the Feeney Amendment to have their names and actions
reported to the Justice Department, thus establishing what Sen. Teddy Kennedy
denounced as a judicial "blacklist."
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- Why would Chertoff give up a lifetime seat on the federal
bench to take a job in the hornet's nest of problems that is the DHS? According
to a top Jersey Democratic pol who knows Chertoff well, Chertoff--described
as being "as cold-blooded as they come"-- has a personal agenda
that includes becoming U.S. Attorney General and, eventually, grabbing
a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. But there's a problem for Chertoff with
conservative Republicans--he happens to be pro-choice. So, taking the DHS
job is Chertoff's way to "make his bones, as they say in Jersey, and
grab headlines as a hard-line persecutor of "the towel-heads to please
the right and neutralize his abortion stance.
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- However, Chertoff has zero experience in running anything
remotely resembling DHS, a mammoth with 180,000 employees and 22 federal
agencies under its umbrella. He was picked for two reasons: his political
loyalty to Bush (he won,t go off the reservation on his own as Tom Ridge
did) and the fact that he's already been confirmed by the Senate thrice,
so he has no hidden Kerik-like problems and will sail through with little
or no opposition from the spineless Democrats (he's already been endorsed
by Sens. Chuck Schumer and Joe Lieberman for the DHS job). But choosing
someone on the basis of confirmability rather than qualifications is dangerous--as
is the choice of a hyper-ambitious Torquemada for a job with enormous power
over our already-reduced rights and liberties, which will no doubt be further
eroded under Chertoff.
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- http://direland.typepad.com/direland/2005/01/mike_chertoffs_.html
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