Policy differences are no reason to lose your head

On one side of Capitol Hill, Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans dropped their opposition Wednesday to Attorney General nominee Eric Holder after Holder privately pledged not to prosecute officials from President George W. Bush’s administration who were involved in interrogation of terrorist detainees. On the other side of the Capitol two days earlier, the House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed former Bush aide Karl Rove to testify on a variety of policy issues and decisions. Nowhere in all of this political maneuvering was there any clear statement that mere policy differences should never serve as a pretext for inflicting partisan vengeance.

The idea of prosecuting those who crafted or implemented Bush administration terrorist interrogation policies, for instance, should never have come up even as a suggestion, much less as a bargaining point on the Holder nomination. Those who participated in the interrogations did so in good faith under difficult and unprecedented circumstances. Even the liberal columnist Richard Cohen of the Washington Post wrote this week that “it is imperative that our intelligence agents not have to fear that a sincere effort will result in being hauled before some congressional committee or a grand jury.” Or being thrown in jail for trying to protect America

Likewise with Rove and the Justice Department’s firing of eight U.S. attorneys in 2006. The simple fact is that it is any administration’s prerogative to fire U.S. attorneys. In 1993, Bill Clinton fired every U.S. attorney in the country in one blow. In the 2006 firings, most of the U.S. attorneys in question were fired because they balked at the administration’s policy decisions about which cases should get the most attention. Whether wise or not – or even whether politically pure or not – those policy decisions are exactly the types of choices a president is elected to make. Calling Rove to testify under oath is a transparent attempt by Conyers to stage a show trial (not to mention a deliberate perjury trap), trying to find a criminal statute to apply to a predetermined verdict of guilt, to punish policy choices opposed by the Michigan Democrat and his colleagues.

At least for now, Conyers has the upper hand, though Rove said Thursday evening he will not appear in response to the subpoena. Conyers and the Democrats captured the White House and increased majorities in both chambers of Congress in 2008. Electoral defeat is the appropriate penalty for policy disagreements, not criminal trials. Choosing the latter is a road that ultimately leads to a headsman’s axe for those who lose. And Conyers has forgotten that everybody loses in politics, sooner or later.