In an interview with Fox News Latino yesterday, George W. Bush’s former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales echoed the Obama Justice Department’s legal case against SB 1070, explaining that immigration policy must be handled exclusively by the federal government:

GONZALES: The real story here is not what Arizona and other states like Alabama are doing. The real story is the failure of the federal government to deal with immigration policy. In a perfect world, these states wouldn’t be passing these kinds of laws. Congress and the President would work together, and pass comprehensive immigration reform. We have failed in that respect, and that’s why you see laws like Arizona’s.

I understand the controversy. It’s a very controversial law. I think it’s generally unpopular within the Hispanic community, and probably has been harmful to the Republican Party. We’ll see what the court says. My own view, going into the arguments, was that immigration is an area that’s been preempted by the federal government, and the states do not have the authority. But the arguments did not go very well. I think most court observers would say that the court seemed rather hostile to the government’s position. So we’ll have to wait and see what happens.

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Gonzales is right that Congress failed to enact the comprehensive immigration reform America should have, but the blame for that rests largely on a rump within Gonzales’ own party. President Bush, to his credit, supported a comprehensive immigration bill that enjoyed the support of top Democrats such as Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA), but the bill died in large part due to opposition from a right-wing bloc led by Sens. David Vitter (R-LA), Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Jeff Sessions (R-AL). Subsequent attempts to pass less comprehensive reform under President Obama failed due to filibusters conducted almost entirely by Republicans.

As Gonzales’ comment demonstrates, however, today’s near-unanimous Republican opposition to immigration reform is a fairly new development — beginning largely with the dawn of the Obama Administration. For this reason, it’s unfortunate that the current Supreme Court fight over state immigration laws did not occur while Republicans still controlled the Justice Department. Although there is no way to know for sure whether the Roberts Court would have been more sympathetic to the federal government’s position if the exact same argument had been made by a Republican, the Court’s increasingly partisan nature suggests that some of the justices might have been less moved by Arizona’s arguments if those claims were not also the established view of the GOP.

Alberto Gonzales knows something about distorting the law. As George W. Bush’s White House Counsel, he called the Geneva Convention’s protections for wartime prisoners “quaint” and played a key role in authorizing the Bush Administration’s torture policies. As Attorney General, he presided over massive efforts to politicize the Justice Department’s hiring process, infamously delegating responsibility for much of DOJ’s hiring to former Republican National Committee opposition researcher Monica Goodling.

And yet, in an interview on Fox News this afternoon, even he couldn’t bring himself to claim that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional:

QUESTION: Some on the right are now saying they are concerned that Chief Justice Roberts is not going to go along with the way they want to see this case come out. They believe he might go with the liberals in a possible decision to uphold the law. As you say, having been the man to recommend him to the high Court to President Bush, what is your anecdotal thought on it?

GONZALES: This is a very hard decision. I almost laugh when I hear pundits say it’s going to go this way, it’s going to go that way, it’s a fairly easy decision. I think this is a very difficult decision.

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For the record, it’s not just “pundits” who say that this is an easy case. It’s also iconic conservative judges. Judge Laurence Silberman, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Gonzales’ former boss, upheld the law because the case against it “cannot find real support . . . in either the text of the Constitution or Supreme Court precedent.” Judge Jeffrey Sutton, a former law clerk to conservative Justice Antonin Scalia who spent much of his pre-judicial career looking for ways to undermine federal power, nonetheless wrote his own opinion rejecting a challenge to the Affordable Care Act. And Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, one of the finalists for the Supreme Court seat President Bush eventually gave to Chief Justice Roberts, called the case against health reform “a prescription for economic chaos that the framers, in a simpler time, had the good sense to head off.”

So the Affordable Care Act lawsuit is not a hard case — it is one of the easiest cases the Supreme Court has heard in years. The fact that former Bush Administration official who devoted much of his career to placing politics ahead of the law isn’t willing to embrace the case against health reform only lends credence to that fact.

One of the backbones of GOP frontrunner Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign is an authoritarian plan to openly defy the Supreme Court, to wage a campaign of intimidation against judges who disagree with him, or even to eliminate courts entirely as punishment for handing down decisions he disagrees with.

In interviews with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly yesterday, both of George W. Bush’s last two attorneys general disagreed strongly with Gingrich’s proposal. Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, himself a former federal judge, called the plan “ridiculous,” “irresponsible,” “outrageous,” and “dangerous”:

KELLY: He wants to see the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals entirely abolished, your thoughts on that?

MUKASEY: Ridiculous. . . . to say that you’re going to undo and entire court simply because you don’t like some of their decisions, when there are thousands of cases before that court, is totally irresponsible. It’s outrageous because it essentially does away with the notion that when courts decide cases the proper way to have them reviewed is to go to a higher court. It’s dangerous because, even from the standpoint of the people who put it forward, you have no guarantee that you’ll have a permanent majority. . . . It would end with having a Democratic majority that then decides to abolish the Fourth Circuit and the Eleventh Circuit. And you go on and on and on. And I guess they could then reconstitute another court. It would reduce the entire judicial system to a spectacle.

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had a similar reaction:

GONZALES: The notion or the specter of bringing judges before the Congress, like a schoolchild being brought before the principal is, to me, a little bit troubling . . . . I cannot support and I would not support efforts that appear to be intimidation or retaliation against judges.

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Bear in mind that this is the same Alberto Gonzales that helped justify Bush’s torture policies and who presided over a dangerous and embarrassing politicization of the Justice Department. When even that guy thinks you have insufficient respect for the rule of law, it’s a pretty good sign that you’ve gone off the deep end.