The Schumer show trials

Kimberly Strassel discusses Chuck Schumer's latest bad faith effort to attack the Justice Department and Alberto Gonzales. She describes the Comey show last week and notes only one Republican who stood up and challenged the Schumer story line.

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Democrats are calling for a vote of no-confidence in the attorney general, which they hope will finally force a resignation. Should he go, you can bet they'll claim this is reason enough for his successor to appoint a special prosecutor to look into everything Mr. Gonzales touched--"torture memos," Guantanamo. As a bonus, the affair has given Democrats cover to further attempt to hamstring the president's surveillance powers.

The only guy who seems wise to this game is Pennsylvania Republican Arlen Specter. While it didn't get much notice, Mr. Specter had his own questions for Mr. Comey, and ultimately got the former DOJer to admit that, in fact, no one had pressured him to change his views on the wiretapping program; that President Bush had instead told Mr. Comey to do what he thought was right; and that the program had gone ahead legally. In short, this was a straightforward policy dispute between serious Bush officials, one that an aggrieved Mr. Comey, and a politically motivated Mr. Schumer, had nonetheless managed to spin into the stuff of scandal.

Sen. Specter, while hardly a cheerleader for Mr. Gonzales, also took care to draw a line between a narrow investigation into whether there had been "chicanery" in the attorney firings (none has been shown), and broader attacks on presidential authority. This places him nearly alone among his GOP colleagues. The majority of Senate Republicans are of the view that anything to do with Mr. Gonzales is too politically messy to touch, and that it's easier to pretend none of this is happening. Mr. Specter was the lone Republican even to show up for the Comey hearing.

They'd do well to wake up. Congressional Republicans have been dealt a tough hand; the White House and in particular the Justice Department have handled the attorneys affair abysmally. Mr. Gonzales has come across as an absentee leader, top officials have offered lame and conflicting explanations of what happened, and the Justice Department blithely turned over documents that assured months of congressional digging. Jumping into this mess won't be fun.

But if Republicans don't engage soon, Mr. Schumer will be free to expand this probe until it engulfs the presidency and the wider party--in the process stripping both of their ability to defend and continue key wartime programs. The GOP lost the recent congressional elections in part because Democrats painted them as incapable and ethically suspect. Mr. Schumer led that effort in the Senate, and knows it can work. Are they going to let him do it again?

No kidding. It is time to fight back because Schumer is not going to get tired of treating the administration like a pinata. It is time to attack Schumer and his bad faith attacks on the Justice Department. Schumer started this battle because he wanted to stop the investigation of Democrat voter fraud which was the primary reason for changing US attorneys who were not sufficiently aggressive in pushing those cases. The way to defeat him and this spurious attack is to prosecute the cases and show the fraud that he is actively trying to cover up.