The Book of Bastards (23 page)

At first blush, former U.S. Congresswoman Katherine Harris seems like too much of a small fry to make the cut of the top 101 bastards in American history. But infamy, like greatness, is all about impact. Through a single dastardly act as Florida Secretary of State in 2000 the otherwise inconsequential Harris cemented her place of dishonor in the Halls of Bastardry.

The hotly contested 2000 election pitted Texas Governor George W. Bush against sitting Vice President Al Gore. It split the country along partisan lines. While outgoing Democratic President Bill Clinton still enjoyed great personal popularity, many voters had grown weary of his scandal-plagued administration. The Republican Party leadership believed that this fatigue, their control of both houses of Congress, and the far-left candidacy of consumer advocate and Green-Party gadfly Ralph Nader would give them an opportunity to win the White House.

On election night, Gore swept most of the Northeast and the Pacific Coast; Bush took the Deep South, the Sunbelt, Mountain West, and Rust-Belt states. Neither side had achieved the 270 electoral votes required to win. And so it all came down to a closely divided Florida. The Sunshine State's election was the responsibility of one woman: one-time corporate vice president and scandal-tinged Republican Florida Secretary of State Harris.

According to exit polls, Florida voters initially favored Gore. As the vote tallies began rolling in, however, things didn't look so clear. At 2:16 a.m. est, Fox News called the state and the presidency for Bush with only eighty-five percent of the votes counted; Fox's election desk, incidentally, was run by Bush's
cousin
John Ellis. Bush's margin of “victory” in the final count shrank to only 1,784, triggering an automatic recount under Florida election law. The recount further reduced Bush's margin of victory to 327 with one county still outstanding. Gore requested a manual recount in four disputed counties.

Partisan hack Harris announced that she was going to certify the results by the mandated November 15 deadline, well before any hand recounts could have been completed. Gore's camp sued to extend the deadline; the recounts continued.

Harris confirmed Bush as the winner on November 15, but refused to consider the numbers from the recounts then underway. Two days later, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the hand recount results must be included in the totals; November 26 became the new certification deadline.

Harris again declared Bush the winner on November 26, this time by 537 votes. The final decision, though, went to the U.S. Supreme Court. On December 9, all manual recounts terminated pending the court's decision. Three days later, in a highly controversial decision, the U.S. Supreme Court stopped all recounts in Florida, effectively finishing what Harris started and handing the election to Bush.

Harris was rewarded with election to a congressional seat in a safely Republican district; she served two terms before the Republican Party abandoned her when she ran for the Senate in 2006. Eleven people on her staff also resigned shortly after she announced her candidacy, citing her ever more erratic behavior. She got creamed in the general election and is currently out of office.

He was born into a Belgian Jewish family that fled the Nazis and raised him in Brooklyn. Today Marc Rich is an international businessman best known for receiving a suspiciously timed pardon from President Bill Clinton on his last day in office.

Under the U.S. Constitution, the president of the United States has the power of pardons in all federal cases except those of impeachment. This power is absolute, with its roots in the Royal Prerogative of Mercy under English Common Law. The president's decisions regarding whom to pardon and for what are not subject to any review by any court; it is one of the few presidential powers not subject to the system of checks and balances set out in the Constitution. As such it is one of the chief executive's most powerful tools.

Some pardon decisions, of course, have proven controversial. The most famous example is President Gerald Ford's decision to pardon President Richard Nixon after the latter resigned. Similarly, in what was to become known as “Pardongate,” Clinton issued 140 pardons and commuted 36 sentences on January 19, 2001, his last full day in office.

Commodities trader Rich received what was probably Clinton's most controversial pardon. Rich became a high profile fugitive after New York U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani indicted him on charges of tax evasion and illegal trading with Iran in 1983. The charges stemmed from accusations that he traded crude oil with Iran during the late 1970s hostage crisis. Rich avoided trial by staying in Switzerland, a country which does not recognize tax evasion as an extraditable offense. An attempt to lure Rich to a country that would hand him over failed. He continued to run a multibillion-dollar business empire from Europe; at one point he was even rated the 242nd richest man in America, though he hadn't lived here in decades.

Rich's pardon raised eyebrows because of his large donations to the Democratic National Committee and to Clinton's presidential library foundation over the years. Clinton justified the pardon on the grounds that charges like those against Rich were typically dealt with in a civil not criminal court. Clinton made Rich agree that he would not use the pardon as a defense to any civil actions that may be brought against him in the United States should he choose to return.

For all that, Clinton was still remarkably tone-deaf on this issue compared to his presidential peers. When the end of his own presidency drew near, George W. Bush did
not
pardon political donors petitioning for relief; he also did very little to protect his own office-holders facing their own looming legal problems. Bush even went so far as rebuffing Vice President Dick Cheney's repeated nagging about a possible pardon for one of his aides. Cheney hoped for a reprieve for his former Chief of Staff Scooter Libby, who was convicted on perjury charges.

As of the time this book was written, Rich has not returned to the United States.

Longtime politician Dick Cheney has been the secretary of defense, the White House chief of staff, and the U.S. vice president. Cheney has also been a draftdodger, a liar, a warmonger, and a would-be demolisher of the U.S. Constitution.

To say that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 “changed everything” is a gross understatement. 9/11 ushered in a new era of shoeless inspections, pat-down searches, bans of fingernail clippers, and even excessive liquids on flights. But far more worrisome for many Americans were other government responses to foreign terrorism: secret “no-fly lists,” extrajudicial detention and interrogation of terror suspects in secret CIA prisons and the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and stories of the government spying on its own citizens without a warrant. Talk of “enhanced interrogation methods” and “extraordinary renditions” has flooded the news. United States citizens have been held incommunicado on military bases as “unlawful enemy combatants,” and a host of other atrocities that most Americans consider abhorrent to their view of the Constitution have occurred in the years since 9/11. All of these factors have helped strain America's relationships with her allies at a time when she can ill-afford to do so.

And all of them can be laid directly at Cheney's doorstep.

As bad as these things are, however, none of them can compare to Cheney's attempted power-grab in the months that followed 9/11. Cheney did not merely try to
circumvent
the system of checks and balances put into the Constitution by the Founding Fathers. In fact the vice president tried to assume for himself the powers of a dictator; he wanted to be a man accountable to no one and subject to no one's oversight. If he had succeeded, he could have kept whatever secrets he wanted for as long as he damn well pleased.

In 2003 Cheney began refusing to disclose the secrets his office was keeping to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). This directly violated an Executive Order issued by former President Bill Clinton in 1995 and reissued by President George W. Bush. The order required all offices within the executive branch to make their papers available to the NARA; it promoted transparency and allowed thorough public oversight of the government's actions.

Cheney refused on the grounds that the orders did not apply to him; he was, after all, both vice president and president of the Senate, which placed him outside of the executive branch. If Cheney had his way, records of his involvement in many Bush administration scandals — from warrantless wiretapping to the administration's involvement, if any, in the Enron debacle — would never see the light of day.

An open government watchdog group eventually sued in federal court to force Cheney's office to turn over its records. United States District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly granted the group's motion. She required Cheney's office to save its records and to turn them over to the NARA in due course. There's no telling what Cheney had already ordered shredded before Kollar-Kotelly's ruling.

When John McCain lost the 2008 election, it was seen in part as a public vote against Cheney. People were fed up with his actions as vice president, his involvement in the Plame/Libby scandal, and his repeated executive branch power grabs. After leaving office the once-hard-to-pin-down Cheney has done a one-eighty. The former vice president has been all over the news, offering harsh criticism of his boss's successor, Barack Obama.

Born in New York City to Jamaican immigrant parents, Colin Luther Powell is in many ways the embodiment of the American dream. He was the first African American to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and to serve as both national security advisor and U.S. Secretary of State. A veteran with combat experience in Vietnam, he is also the architect of the Powell Doctrine, a view advocating the need for the use of overwhelming force in war. However, Powell will likely be best remembered by history for selling the need for the invasion of Iraq to the American public and to the United Nations.

After the 9/11 attacks in 2001 the Bush administration set about recasting the Middle East in its preferred image. Invading Afghanistan and defeating Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies was not enough for the Bushies. They wanted another crack at Iraq, so they could “finish the job” that Dubya's “daddy,” the first President George Bush, started with the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

How, then, to sell the American public on an invasion of Iraq?

That task fell to U.S. Secretary of State Powell. He had chaired the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Powell enjoyed enormous prestige as a result of his tour as chairman of the Joint Chiefs and was nothing if not knowledgeable about the region. Widely seen as a moderating influence in the administration, Powell did not share its hawkish view on Iraq. In fact, he felt that the economic sanctions against Iraq were already working to keep Saddam in check. Still, Bush's team sought support for an invasion and worked to assemble an international coalition to conduct it. So they twisted Powell's arm. Hard.

And on February 5, 2003, speaking before the UN Security Council, Colin L. Powell sold himself out. Relying on intelligence data that was later revealed to be untrustworthy at best and blatantly fabricated at worst, Powell told the UN Security Council:

All of these claims were false. In its final report, the Iraq Survey Group said that Saddam's chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs were destroyed in 1991. In fact, the report said, Saddam was first and foremost concerned with ending the UN sanctions; he maintained those programs as an afterthought.

The speech cost Powell all of his considerable credibility, and it turned out to be for nothing. When the UN Security Council refused to pass such a resolution despite Powell's speech to them, America invaded anyway.

About a year later, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card asked Powell to resign. Bush replaced him with the more “compliant” Condoleezza Rice.

Powell has since distanced himself from the Bush administration, with mixed results. In 2008 he crossed party lines and endorsed Barack Obama for president; he continues to advocate on behalf of the troops he once represented as Joint Chiefs chair. However, that does not change the fact that his speech to the UN in 2003 helped put these same troops in harm's way.