Alberto Gonzales

Alberto R. Gonzales (born August 4, 1955) is the 80th and current Attorney General of the United States, becoming the first Hispanic to serve in the position. He formerly served under U.S. President George W. Bush as White House Counsel, and prior to that had been appointed by Bush to the Texas Supreme Court.

Personal background

Gonzales was born in San Antonio, Texas and raised in Humble, near Houston. He was the second of eight children born to Pablo and Maria Gonzales. His father, who died in 1982, was a construction worker. Both his parents were children of immigrants from Mexico with less than a high-school education themselves; in the midst of a national debate in the US about immigration from Mexico, Gonzales told Wolf Blitzer on CNN that no immigration documentation exists for three of his grandparents and they may have entered and resided in the United States illegally (transcript).

An honors student at MacArthur High School in Houston, Gonzales enlisted in the United States Air Force in 1973, serving for two years at Fort Yukon, Alaska before being accepted to the United States Air Force Academy in 1975. In 1977, he transferred to Rice University, where he was a member of Lovett College and earned a degree in political science in 1979; he then earned a Juris Doctor (J.D) degree from Harvard Law School in 1982. He was the only one of his siblings to finish college. He has been married twice: he and his first wife, Diane Clemens, divorced in 1985; he and his second wife, Rebecca Turner Gonzales, have three sons.

Despite keeping a low profile about his religious affiliation, Gonzales has described himself as a Catholic.

Texas career

Gonzales was an attorney in private practice from 1982 until 1994 with the Houston law firm Vinson and Elkins, where he became a partner. In 1994, he was named general counsel to then-Texas Governor George W. Bush, rising to become Texas Secretary of State in 1997 and finally to be named to the Texas Supreme Court in 1999, both appointments made by Governor Bush. Outside of his political and legal career, Gonzales was active in the community. He was a board director of the United Way of the Texas Gulf Coast from 1993 to 1994, and President of Leadership Houston during this same period. In 1994, Gonzales served as Chair of the Commission for District Decentralization of the Houston Independent School District, and as a member of the Committee on Undergraduate Admissions for Rice University. He was chosen as one of Five Outstanding Young Texans by the Texas Jaycees in 1994. He was a member of delegations sent by the American Council of Young Political Leaders to Mexico in 1996 and to the People's Republic of China in 1995. He received the Presidential Citation from the State Bar of Texas in 1997 for his dedication to addressing basic legal needs of the indigent. In 1999, he was named Latino Lawyer of the Year by the Hispanic National Bar Association.

As counsel to Governor Bush, Gonzales helped Bush be excused from jury duty when he was called in a 1996 Travis County drunk driving case. The case led to controversy during Bush's 2000 presidential campaign because Bush's answers to the potential juror questionnaire did not disclose Bush's own 1976 misdemeanor drunk driving conviction.George W. Bush DUI arrest record, The Smoking Gun. Gonzales' formal request for Bush to be excused from jury duty hinged upon the fact that, as Governor of Texas, he might be called upon to pardon the accused in the case. Upon learning of the 1976 conviction, the prosecutor in the 1996 case (a Democrat) felt he had been "directly deceived". The defense attorney in the case called Gonzales' arguments "laughable".Bryce, Robert. Prosecutor says Bush "directly deceived" him to avoid jury duty, Salon.com,November 5, 2000.

As Governor Bush's counsel in Texas, Gonzales also reviewed all clemency requests. A 2003 article in The Atlantic Monthly asserts that Gonzales gave insufficient counsel, failed to take into consideration a wide array of factors, and actively worked against clemency in a number of borderline cases. (The state of Texas executed more prisoners during Gonzales' term, and still has more prisoners on death row, than any other state.) Berlow, Alan. The Texas Clemency Memos, The Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2003. Dean, John W. White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales's Texas Execution Memos: How They Reflect on the President, And May Affect Gonzales's Supreme Court Chances, FindLaw, June 20, 2003.

Legal problems

Gonzales had connections with the former energy company Enron, which collapsed amid financial scandals in 2002; the law firm Gonzales worked for in Texas, Vinson and Elkins, represented Enron, and the company gave Gonzales $6,500 in campaign contributions for his 2000 run for re-election to the Texas Supreme Court, in which he defeated Libertarian Lance Smith with 81% of the popular vote.

Those and other incidents have led many to questions Gonzales' integrity and his perception of justice. Many others, however, regard these accusations as politically motivated attacks.

When Bush was sworn in as President of the United States in 2001, he appointed Gonzales White House Counsel. In this position, Gonzales has been already party to controversial legal matters involving the Bush administration. As a result, he has become a lightning rod for criticism of the administration's actions in these affairs.

During his January 2005 Attorney General Senate confirmation hearings, Gonzales apparently lied to Congress. Senator Russ Feingold, in attempting to determine where Gonzales believed the president's authority ends, asked whether the president could act in contravention of existing criminal laws and spy on U.S. citizens without a warrant. Gonzales avoided answering the question by claiming that warrantless eavesdropping was a "hypothetical situation" and thus impossible to answer. He went on to add that it was "not the policy or the agenda of this president" to authorize actions that conflict with existing law. These statements were later proven false, when on February 6, 2006, he testified before Congress to his knowledge of the U.S. domestic spying program while he was White House Counsel.

Gonzales has avoided further investigation surrounding his testimony, partly because Republican Senator Arlen Specter refused to swear in Gonzales, but also because confirmation hearings testimony was ruled as off limits as a precondition to questioning Gonzales.

List of Texas Supreme Court opinions, concurrences, and dissents by Gonzales

This is a list of cases in which Alberto Gonzales wrote the court opinion, wrote a concurring opinion, or wrote a dissent. Cases in which he joined in an opinion written by another justice are not included. The Texas Supreme Court issued 84 opinions during Gonzales's tenure on the court, according to LexisNexis.

Court opinions

Fitzgerald v. Advanced Spine Fixation Systems (42 Tex. Sup. J. 985).
Texas Farmers Insurance Company v. Murphy (42 Tex. Sup. J. 998)
Mid-Century Insurance Company v. Kidd (42 Tex. Sup. J. 1007)
In re Missouri Pac. R.R. Co. (42 Tex. Sup. J. 1018)
General Motors Corporation v. Sanchez (42 Tex. Sup. J. 969)
Mallios v. Baker (43 Tex. Sup. J. 254)
Gulf Insurance Company v. Burns Motors (43 Tex. Sup. J. 647)
Southwestern Refining Co. v. Bernal (43 Tex. Sup. J. 706)
Golden Eagle Archery, Inc. v. Jackson (43 Tex. Sup. J. 989)
City of Fort Worth v. Zimlich (43 Tex. Sup. J. 972)
Prudential Insurance Company of America v. Financial Review Services, Inc. (43 Tex. Sup. J. 980)
Texas Department of Transportation v. Able (43 Tex. Sup. J. 1055)
Pustejovsky v. Rapid-American Corp. (44 Tex. Sup. J. 89)
John G. & Marie Stella Kenedy Memorial Foundation v. Dewhurst (44 Tex. Sup. J. 268) (Opinion has been withdrawn by the court).

Concurring opinions

In re Dallas Morning News (43 Tex. Sup. J. 192)
Osterberg v. Peca (43 Tex. Sup. J. 380)
In re Jane Doe 3 (43 Tex. Sup. J. 508)
Lopez v. Munoz, Hockema, & Reed (43 Tex. Sup. J. 806) (Partial concurrence)
In re Doe (43 Tex. Sup. J. 910) (This case is popularly referred to as "In re Jane Doe 5")
Grapevine Excavation, Inc. v. Maryland Lloyds (43 Tex. Sup. J. 1086)

Dissenting opinions

Lopez v. Munoz, Hockema, & Reed (43 Tex. Sup. J. 806) (Partial dissent)

War on Terror

The Executive Order 13233, drafted by Gonzales and issued by George W. Bush on November 1, 2001 shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks, attempted to place limitations on the Freedom of Information Act by restricting access to the records of former presidents.

Gonzales authored a controversial memo in January of 2002 that explored whether Article III of the Geneva Convention even applied to Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters captured in Afghanistan and held in concentration facilities around the world, including Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The memo made several arguments both for and against providing Article III protection to Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters. He concluded that Article III was outdated and ill-suited for dealing with captured Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters. He described as "quaint" the provisions that require providing captured Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters "commissary privileges, scrip, athletic uniforms, and scientific instruments". He also argued that existing military regulations and instructions from the President were more than adequate to ensure that the principles of the Geneva Convention would be applied. He also argued that undefined language in the Geneva Convention, such as "outrages upon personal dignity" and "inhuman treatment", could make officials and military leaders subject to the War Crimes Act of 1996 if mistreatment was discovered.Gonzales, Alberto. Decision Re Application of the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War to the Conflict with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, Memorandum for the President, January 25, 2002. (PDF file provided by MSNBC/Newsweek)

A secret 2002 Justice Department memorandum cleared by Gonzales argued that laws prohibiting torture do "not apply to the president's detention and interrogation of enemy combatants", and that the pain caused by interrogation must include "injury such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions — in order to constitute torture".

In 2004, when this memo was leaked to the press, Gonzales said about the memo in Senate confirmation hearings that "...I don't recall today whether or not I was in agreement with all of the analysis, but I don't have a disagreement with the conclusions then reached by the department." This indicates that, despite the Bush administration's withdrawal from the memo, Gonzales still believes that the Justice Department was correct in its reasoning about torture.

Gonzales faced further controversy when he authored the Presidential Order which authorized the use of military tribunals to try terrorist suspects. He fought with Congress to keep vice-president Dick Cheney's Energy task force documents from being reviewed. Gonzales was also an early advocate of the controversial USA PATRIOT Act. He is also accused of being involved in the decision to allow foreign combatants in U.S. custody to be deported to nations that allow torture, in order to extract further information from them; despite the mounting evidence, he denies that he has ever supported this measure.

Attorney General nomination and confirmation

Gonzales' name was sometimes floated as a possible nominee to the United States Supreme Court during Bush's first presidential term, although this rumor was heard much less often once his name had become linked to the "torture memos" and other controversies. On November 10, 2004, it was announced that he would be nominated to replace United States Attorney General John Ashcroft for Bush's second term. Gonzales was once regarded as moderate compared to Ashcroft since, unlike many in the Bush administration, he did not oppose abortion or affirmative action.

These controversies were the grounds for a strong degree of opposition to Gonzales that started during his Senate confirmation proceedings at the beginning of President Bush's second term. The New York Times quoted anonymous Republican officials as saying that Gonzales's appointment to Attorney General was a way to "bolster Mr. Gonzales's credentials" en route to a later Supreme Court appointment. The appointment to Attorney General, in a maneuver designed by Karl Rove, would "get out of the way" the above controversies and allow Gonzales to demonstrate his positions on issues such as affirmative action and abortion. Others believe that Bush chose him as Attorney General because the pro-life base of the party would never allow a pro-choice Republican to be appointed to the Supreme Court.Bumiller, Elisabeth and Neil A. Lewis. Choice of Gonzales May Blaze a Trail for the High Court, New York Times, November 12, 2004.

Gonzales was confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 60-36 on February 3, 2005. He was sworn in on February 14, 2005, becoming the highest-placed Hispanic ever in the U.S. Government.

In late June 2005, Gonzales approved the removal of the drapery from the partially nude statues in the Great Hall of the Justice Department; Ashcroft had authorized the drapery three years earlier.

Possible Supreme Court nomination

O'Connor vacancy

Shortly before the July 1, 2005 retirement of Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States Sandra Day O'Connor, rumors started circulating that a memo had leaked from the White House stating that upon the retirement of either O'Connor or Chief Justice of the United States William Rehnquist, that Gonzales would be the first Bush nominee for a vacancy on the Court.

Quickly, conservative stalwarts In Their Own Words: "Do As We Say, Not As We Do" Says the Right Wing on Judicial Nominees, Right Wing Watch, People for the American Way, July 6, 2005. such as National Review magazine Editorial: No to Justice Gonzales, National Review, June 28, 2005. and Focus on the Family, among other socially conservative groups, stated they would oppose a Gonzales nomination.Howard Fineman, Howard and Debra Rosenberg. The Holy War Begins: Bush must choose between the big tent or the revival tent. Inside his Supreme Machine, Newsweek, July 11, 2005. Much of their opposition to Gonzales has been based on his perceived support of abortion rights; typically, they cite his place in the majority opinions of various Texas Supreme Court rulings in a series of In re Jane Doe cases from 2000 that ordered lower courts to reconsider minor women's requests for a "judicial bypass" provided in a provision of Texas' parental notification law, and in one case (43 Tex. Sup. J. 910), granted the bypass that allowed the girl to obtain an abortion without notifying her parents. Gonzales wrote concurring opinions in two of these cases: In re Jane Doe 3 (43 Tex. Sup. J. 508) and In re Jane Doe 5 (43 Tex. Sup. J. 910). For In re Jane Doe 3 he concurred, on the legal grounds that the lower court had issued its ruling only one business day after the Texas Supreme Court had issued guidance on what the applicant for a judicial bypass must prove, with the differently reasoned majority opinion to remand the case to the lower courts. For In re Jane Doe 5 his concurring opinion began with the sentence, "I fully join in the Court's judgment and opinion." He went on, though, to address the three dissenting opinions, primarily one by Nathan L. Hecht alleging that the court majority's members had disregarded legislative intent in favor of their personal ideologies. Gonzales's opinion deals mostly with how to establish legislative intent. He wrote, "We take the words of the statute as the surest guide to legislative intent. Once we discern the Legislature's intent we must put it into effect, even if we ourselves might have made different policy choices." He added, "to construe the Parental Notification Act so narrowly as to eliminate bypasses, or to create hurdles that simply are not to be found in the words of the statute, would be an unconscionable act of judicial activism," and, "While the ramifications of such a law and the results of the Court's decision here may be personally troubling to me as a parent, it is my obligation as a judge to impartially apply the laws of this state without imposing my moral view on the decisions of the Legislature."

Political commentators had suggested that Bush forecast the selection of Gonzales with his comments defending the Attorney General made on July 6, 2005 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Bush stated, "I don't like it when a friend gets criticized. I'm loyal to my friends. All of a sudden this fellow, who is a good public servant and a really fine person, is under fire. And so, do I like it? No, I don't like it, at all." However, this speculation proved to be incorrect, as Bush nominated D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge John Roberts to the Supreme Court.

Rehnquist vacancy

After the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist on September 3, 2005, creating another vacancy, speculation resumed that President Bush may nominate Gonzales to the Court. This again proved to be incorrect, as Bush decided to nominate Roberts to the Chief Justice position, and on October 3, 2005, nominated Harriet Miers as Associate Justice, to replace Justice O'Connor. On October 27, 2005, Miers withdrew her nomination, again renewing speculation about a possible Gonzales nomination. This was laid to rest when Judge Samuel Alito received the nomination and subsequent confirmation.

On September 11, 2005, U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary chairman Arlen Specter was quoted as saying that it was "a little too soon" after Gonzales' appointment as Attorney General for him to be appointed to another position, and that such an appointment would require a new series of confirmation hearings. ^{^*}

Quotes

"I would respectfully disagree with your statement that we're becoming more like our enemy. We are nothing like our enemy, Senator. While we are struggling, mightily, trying to find out what happened at Abu Ghraib, they are beheading people like Danny Pearl and Nick Berg. We are nothing like our enemies, Senator." – Alberto Gonzales, to U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, during confirmation hearings before the U.S. Senate, January 6, 2005

"President Washington, President Lincoln, President Wilson, President Roosevelt have all authorized electronic surveillance on a far broader scale..." Testimony before Senate Judiciary Committee, February 6, 2006

References

External links

Official biography from whitehouse.gov
Announcement of his nomination on CNN
Current Law Office in Thomson Legal Record
Vinson and Elkins, Lawyers
A second biography from ABC News
"Death in Texas" by Sister Helen Prejean in The New York Review of Books
"A Poor Choice" — Human Rights Watch
Letter to 9/11 Commission from FindLaw
The Geneva Convention is "obsolete" memo in PDF from Washington in Depth, AP
Bush Admin. policy memos re: torture, interrogations, and POW status from FindLaw
Progression of memos and decisions from lawofwar.org
Alberto R. Gonzales from Disinfopedia.org
Dear Mr. Gonzales from truthout.org
Kennedy urges Senate to deny Gonzales nomination over torture policies from Senator Edward M. Kennedy, February 1, 2005.

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