The Federal Marriage Amendment
In 2004, President Bush called for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as exclusively between one man and one woman. While Alberto Gonzales never made public pronouncements on the amendment, many believed that he was one of the lawyers assigned by the President to examine different federal approaches to banning same-sex marriage. Mr. Gonzales has never made rulings or taken public stances on gay rights or marriage.
USA Patriot Act & the War on Terror
As White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales was pivotal in getting the USA Patriot Act drafted and rapidly passed through Congress. The Patriot Act is a law that allows officials unchecked license to investigate, arrest, detain and interrogate anyone on the grounds of suspicion of terrorism.
Gonzales first gained national notoriety by paving the legal groundwork that led to the torture of US detainees at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and other sites. He authored a 2002 memo to the President in which he termed the war on terror a "new kind of war" that makes the Geneva Convention international standards for treatment of prisoners "obsolete" and "quaint."
He also argued that the standard for prohibited interrogation techniques must include "injury such as death, organ failure or serious imparment of body functions." He amended that statement just prior to 2005 confirmation hearings to be US Attorney General.
Gonzales drafted the rules presently used for military tribunals held to try suspected terrorists, and defends the use of tribunals, rather than the US judicial system, so as to "allow the government to use classified information as evidence without compromising intelligence or military efforts" and to "dispense justice swiftly...without years of pretrial proceedings or post-trial appeals."
Gonzales clearly possesses a judicial ideology that permits aggressive interpretation of the law in fighting suspected terrorists.
Freedom of the Press & Executive Privilege
In 2002, Gonzales told an Associated Press conference"There is a danger for the president's lawyer to be addressing a roomful of editors....You have a right to know what is going on in government, but we also believe that such rights are not absolute."
In the same speech, Gonzales stated that he finds it "permissible under law" to delay or disregard Freedom of Information Act requests from federal agencies.
In a 2001 executive order drafted by Gonzales, more than 68,000 pages of Reagan/Bush administration records were exempted from public release, a massive change to open federal "checks & balances" laws. Under this order, records may be kept indefinitely secret.
In 2002, Gonzales aggressively sought to shield from public release records of Vice President Cheney's energy policy task force.
Death Penalty
During his 1995 to 1997 stint as legal counsel to Governor Bush, Gonzales prepared memos on 57 death penalty cases. The memos were generated to summarize crucial issues and mitigating factors for Bush to ponder clemency.
Atlantic Monthly published a 2003 article in which it charged that the Gonzales clemency memos were woefully incomplete, and repeatedly deleted details that were critical and essential: mental incompetence, mental illness, ineffective counsel, racial discrimination in the jury, mitigating or contradictory evidence, "even actual evidence of innocence."
During the Bush/Gonzales term, 56 of those 57 persons were executed by the state of Texas, including a 33-year-old mentally retarded man with the communications skills of a 7-year-old.
Immigration
Albertos Gonzales, as White House legal counsel, has been a leading supporter of the President's guest-worker immigration reform plan, which would allow immigrants entry into the US to work for up to 6 years under certain conditions, but give no guarantees or fast-track consideration for permanent residency or citizenship. The President's ideas are considered to be primarily business-friendly.
The ACLU White Paper reports that Gonzales wrote a San Antonio newspaper editorial lamenting the burdensome and "big brotherish" aspects of a proposed INS program that would track undocumented immigrants once they crossed into the US.
