Apparently not as much as we should have. And there's going to be even less of it than we deserve.
Because president Bush has appointed Alberto Gonzales to head the Justice Department.
And Gonzales is going to be far worse than John Ashcroft ever was.
With Ashcroft you knew where you stood - love him or hate him, what you saw was what you got.
Gonzales is a much cleverer smoothie. As an example of his operating style, consider this:
In 1996 ... the governor [George W. Bush] was called to serve on a jury in Austin in a trial of an accused drunk driver ... while Bush stood talking in the hallways, his counsel, [Alberto] Gonzales, was meeting behind closed doors with the judge and the defense lawyer, David Wahlberg ... the defense lawyer agreed to dismiss the governor as a potential juror.
Bush thus avoided the need to answer questions under oath about whether he had ever been arrested for drunk driving.
Four years later, when it was revealed that Bush had once been arrested for drunk driving, Wahlberg understood why Gonzales had insisted on excusing the governor from jury duty.
"He snookered all of us," Wahlberg later told Texas Monthly. [A Trusted Lawyer and Friend to the President 11/11/04 subscription] (Story links open in new windows)
But that's just style - Gonzales is dangerous on substance.
As White House counsel, Gonzales helped craft legal arguments that "enemy combatants" designated by the president, including U.S. citizens, could be imprisoned for months without access to lawyers or the right to challenge their detentions in court. The Supreme Court found such restrictions unconstitutional this year.
Gonzales was also an architect of the system of military tribunals that the Defense Department is using in Cuba to prosecute suspected terrorists. Critics complained that detainees were being denied their basic rights under the Geneva Convention. The survival of the military tribunals was cast in doubt this week in a ruling by a federal judge.
And Gonzales solicited a Justice Department legal opinion in August 2002 that held that international torture laws did not protect suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters apprehended in Afghanistan. That position has been viewed by some as having laid the groundwork for the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
"We definitely think it is an inappropriate choice," said Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, which says Gonzales bears major responsibility for the prison scandal.
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