Left News and Views

If anyone questions the deleterious effect President Bush’s politicization of the Department of Justice and the judiciary has had on our system of jurisprudence, they need look no further than the judge’s dismissal of the Valerie Plame’s suit over the Bush administration’s disclosure of her name and covert status to the media.

Plame and her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, sued Vice President Dick Cheney, his former deputy and current pardoned felon, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, political operative Karl Rove and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage for their roles in the outing.

It would be rather difficult to deny that Judge John D. Bates, the judge who dismissed the suit, is a loyal Bushie who got his appointment to the bench in 2001. He is also the judge who dismissed the lawsuit over Dick Cheney’s energy task force records.

In that case, Bates found that Comptroller General David M. Walker, the head of the General Accounting Office, did not have sufficient standing to sue the vice president. Walker had asked the judge to order the White House to reveal the identities of industry executives who helped the administration develop its energy policy at the outset of the Bush Administration.

In declining to do so, and in dismissing Walker’s suit, Judge Bates said that granting the G.A.O. chief’s request “would fly in the face of the restricted role of the federal courts under the Constitution.”

In equally convoluted, hypocritical logic, Judge Bates wrote in the Plame case:

[T]his Court must look beyond the alleged disclosure of Mrs. Wilson’s covert identity and assess whether the underlying conduct was of the type defendants were employed to perform. The proper inquiry in this Court’s view, then, is whether talking to the press (or, in Cheney’s case, participating in an agreement to do so…) in order to discredit a public critic of the Executive Branch and its policies is within the scope of defendants’ duties as federal employees.

The alleged means by which defendants chose to rebut Mr. Wilson’s comments and attack his credibility may have been highly unsavory. But there can be no serious dispute that the act of rebutting public criticism, such as that levied by Mr. Wilson against the Bush Administration’s handling of prewar foreign intelligence, by speaking with members of the press is within the scope of defendants’ duties as high-level Executive Branch officials. Thus, the alleged tortious conduct, namely the disclosure of Mrs. Wilson’s status as a covert operative, was incidental to the kind of conduct that defendants were employed to perform.

In much simpler language, what the Judge said here is that regardless of how “highly unsavory” the methods, you’re okay as long as your intention is merely “to discredit a public critic of the Executive Branch and its policies.”

That pretty much sums up the Bush Administration philosophy, wouldn’t you say?