When INS agents broke into Lazaro Gonzalez’s house at 5 A.M. on April 22 to arrest his 6-year-old nephew Elian Gonzalez, civil libertarians — and those skeptical about giving a refugee child the bum’s rush back to Fidel Castro’s Cuba — had a lot of questions. Tom DeLay promised Republicans would answer them. “You bet there will be congressional hearings,” DeLay said hours after the raid.
Hearings were always a second-best option for Congress. Best would have been to vote citizenship for Elian Gonzalez, or at least residency. That would have taken him out of the jurisdiction of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The INS — in a shocking and irregular reversal of its earlier position — had signaled at least since December that it was disinclined to ask why Juan Miguel Gonzalez didn’t appear to reclaim his son for weeks and then months, why he called those “distant” Miami relatives even before he knew Elian was in trouble, and whether he even wanted his son back in Cuba. But House and Senate Republicans were frightened away by Democratic filibuster threats. So, having failed to rein in the INS when it mattered, Republicans were offering only to hold it accountable after the horse had left the barn.
We wish! When presidential spokesman Joe Lockhart complained recently that “Republicans would rather investigate than legislate,” he was giving them too much credit. They’re not interested in investigating, either. Utah senator Orrin Hatch called a Judiciary Committee hearing for Wednesday, May 3, then postponed it indefinitely when Justice stalled over delivering him a few documents. Such knuckling under has turned the disgrace of the Elian raid into a bipartisan one.
What’s more, the New York Daily News reported on April 29 that Joe Allbaugh, George W. Bush’s campaign manager, passed a message to the Senate not to hold hearings, on the grounds that the Elian issue was a loser. If the story is true (and since it was co-bylined by the reliable veteran Tom DeFrank, we assume it is), then Bush has shown himself less willing than Al Gore to suffer politically for upholding Elian’s right to have someone take a close look at the authoritarian hellhole his mother died trying to remove him from.
Besides, holding the government accountable for its brutal treatment of Elian Gonzalez may not be a loser. When asked to “think specifically about the methods the Justice Department used” to get Elian, Americans disapprove of them, 53-43. In addition, 43 percent of Americans support hearings (54 percent are against). This is an extra-ordinarily high number, given that traditional American hostility to such spectacles has been further heightened by a post-impeachment malaise.
Senator Hatch now says that there will be no hearings at all if the Justice Department documents adequately explain the circumstances of the raid. But the important questions can’t be answered by Justice alone. They include:
Were there secret negotiations with Cuba that led the INS to reverse its position on granting Elian asylum in the immediate aftermath of Fidel Castro’s implicit early-December threat to unleash a boatlift?
Why did Juan Miguel Gonzalez’s “lawyer” Gregory Craig, who negotiated the terms of Juan Miguel’s visit to the United States with Cuban government officials, get a de facto veto on Janet Reno’s side of the negotiations on the eve of the raid? Who hired Gregory Craig? The United Methodist Church is legally paying his expenses, but are the Methodists serving as a “straw” for business interests keen to open up trade with Cuba?
What are the terms of Juan Miguel’s stay here? What on earth is going on out at Wye Plantation? Why have two dozen different Cuban “diplomats” — at least two daily — been allowed to visit Elian when his Miami family and U.S. senators are not? Are any of these “diplomats” the same ones being investigated as spies by the Senate Foreign Relations committee? Are any of them the same ones who emerged from the Cuban Interests Section on the afternoon of April 18, beat up a few protesters, then fled back into diplomatic immunity?
And why does the Justice Department flee accountability for turning Wye into a guarded outpost of Cuban tyranny? Carole Florman, the hardest-line of Janet Reno’s spokesmen, says: “It’s not really our place to say who can come and see him and who may not.” Oh, it isn’t? Then maybe hearings could tell us whose place it is.
But now even Tom DeLay is hedging. He says, “We’ve got to wait and see what we can get.” Maine’s Republican Olympia Snowe is unambiguous: “It would look like a lot of political grandstanding.” She and her craven colleagues are wrong. It’s not grandstanding. Grandstanding is what you call it when a party loses the courage of its convictions, and decides it is unwilling to risk a drop of its political capital to do what it knows to be right.
Christopher Caldwell, for the Editors
