Newsweek describes the Palace Revolt by James Gold­smith and Richard Comey, lawyers in the Jus­tice Depart­ment who stood up against tor­ture and against war­rant­less wiretapping:

The rebels were not whis­tle-blow­ers in the tra­di­tion­al sense. They did not want—indeed avoided—publicity. (Gold­smith con­firmed pub­lic facts about him­self but oth­er­wise declined to com­ment. Comey also declined to com­ment.) They were not down­trod­den career civ­il ser­vants. Rather, they were con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal appointees who had been friends and close col­leagues of some of the true believ­ers they were fight­ing against. They did not see the strug­gle in terms of black and white but in shades of gray—as painful­ly close calls with unavoid­able pit­falls. They wor­ried deeply about whether their prin­ci­ples might put Amer­i­cans at home and abroad at risk. Their sto­ry has been obscured behind legalisms and the veil of secre­cy over the White House. But it is a qui­et­ly dra­mat­ic pro­file in courage. (For its part the White House denies any inter­nal strife. “The propo­si­tion of inter­nal divi­sion in our fight against ter­ror­ism isn’t based in fact,” says Lea Anne McBride, a spokes­woman for Vice Pres­i­dent Dick Cheney. “This admin­is­tra­tion is unit­ed in its com­mit­ment to pro­tect Amer­i­cans, defeat ter­ror­ism and grow democracy.”)

I find it fas­ci­nat­ing how “inter­nal divi­sion” is implic­it­ly equat­ed with debate over the “com­mit­ment to pro­tect Amer­i­cans, defeat ter­ror­ism and grow democ­ra­cy.” Every­one wants that, it’s pie, and chips, for free.

But as the gecko says, you can get that any­where. The trick isn’t agree­ing on the goal, it’s agree­ing on how to get there. And David Gold­smith want­ed to get there with­out shred­ding the Con­sti­tu­tion. “Gold­smith is no exec­u­tive-pow­er abso­lutist. What’s more, his friends say, he did not intend to be a pat­sy for Adding­ton and the hard-lin­ers around Cheney.” Mean­while, Scoot­er Lib­by’s replace­ment, David Adding­ton, does­n’t mind a few parch­ment­cuts along the way. “Adding­ton and a small band of like-mind­ed lawyers set about pro­vid­ing … a legal argu­ment that the pow­er of the pres­i­dent in time of war was vir­tu­al­ly untrammeled.”

And this is the fight. A band of par­ti­sans who want to vest near total pow­er in one man, and com­mit­ted peo­ple from across the polit­i­cal spec­trum who believe in a gov­ern­ment of laws, not of men.

A cou­ple weeks back, there was an exchange over the praise some con­ser­v­a­tives got for com­ing out against the ille­gal domes­tic spy­ing. Ed Kil­go­re of the very cen­trist DLC wrote that these peo­ple are still bad. Max Saw­icky respond­ed by not­ing that there’s a lib­er­tar­i­an strain that wraps around, and there’s noth­ing wrong with prais­ing agreement.

I’d go fur­ther and say that there is a broad con­sen­sus about the way the sys­tem works and should work. Some peo­ple have let them­selves get caught up in a cult of Bush’s per­son­al­i­ty, and it’s nice to see that some peo­ple from across the spec­trum are pre­pared to stand up for prin­ci­ple, even if we don’t always agree on the valid­i­ty of the prin­ci­ples. That’s a bet­ter con­ver­sa­tion to have than a tech­ni­cal debate over what might or might not work.