Gonzales opponents say there are two strikes against him. The first is that he weakened the administration's brief to the Supreme Court in the University of Michigan racial-preference cases. Solicitor General Ted Olson wanted the administration to say that the use of racial preferences to achieve diversity is constitutionally impermissible. Gonzales overruled him.

The second strike is Gonzales's record on abortion as a justice of the Texas supreme court. The state had passed a law requiring parents to be notified before a minor could get an abortion. That law, like most parental-notification laws, allowed judges to waive the requirement if observing it could be expected to lead to the abuse of the girl in question. In its first cases dealing with the law, the court read this judicial-bypass provision broadly — so broadly that one dissenter furiously charged that the law had been gutted.

. . .

So far, the White House campaign for Gonzales has found few takers among social conservatives or legal conservatives generally. Some of the former are regularly discussing what to do if Bush nominates Gonzales.

UPDATE: Of course, this is likely to come up in the confirmation hearings, ya think?

The White House was undeterred. By Jan. 25, 2002, according to a memo obtained by NEWSWEEK, it was clear that Bush had already decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply at all, either to the Taliban or Al Qaeda. In the memo, which was written to Bush by Gonzales, the White House legal counsel told the president that Powell had "requested that you reconsider that decision." Gonzales then laid out startlingly broad arguments that anticipated any objections to the conduct of U.S. soldiers or CIA interrogators in the future. "As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war," Gonzales wrote to Bush. "The nature of the new war places a —high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians." Gonzales concluded in stark terms: "In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

Other places where I've found this memo quoted seem to leave out the preamble explaining how the nature of war has changed, and paint Gonzales as a federal-law-circumventing schemer of Ashcroft's projected mold. A case could be made defending what he said in these memos, and I'm sure he'll defend them quite eloquently himself when the time comes. But I guess this won't be such a "peace offering" to the Left as I'd hoped.