Throughout her tumultuous tenure as attorney general, Janet Reno could always rely on Democrats and liberals to circle the wagons when critics ripped her judgment, competence, and forthrightness. They’d close ranks when the opposition claimed her Justice Department elevated political considerations over legal ones. By contrast, in Alberto Gonzales’s present hour of need, his only enthusiastic supporter appears to be the president. Why?

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Because of politics. Not politicization, as in partisan obstruction of particular investigations. Rather, good, old-fashioned politics in the best sense of the word: namely, an administration’s accountability to its supporters and its fealty to the policies that induced their support.

The Reno Justice Department, whatever else you may think about it, cared passionately about signal “progressive” causes and backed them to the hilt, regardless of criticism. To the contrary, the Gonzales Justice Department and, indeed, the president, often turn spaghetti-spined when the priorities of their base are at stake. How surprising, then, that when friends are most sorely needed there are none to be found.

The contrast emerges in high relief on Wednesday. That is when the Supreme Court once again tackles the McCain-Feingold law — the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 which repealed core First Amendment liberties under the guise of “reforming” campaign-finance regulations.

Campaign-finance reform is a hot-button for the Republican base. It is that rare perfect storm of revulsion shared by social conservatives, business, libertarians and originalist legal scholars. Collectively, they see political speech, political association, and the citizen’s right to petition government squelched by an incumbent-coddling, big-government scheme that betrays freedoms basic to a functioning democracy. Yet, in the most craven act of his administration, President Bush signed BCRA into law despite taking pains to express “reservations about the constitutionality of the broad ban on issue advertising, which restrains the speech of a wide variety of groups on issues of public import in the months closest to an election.”

The president rationalized this dereliction with the modern public official’s all-purpose dodge: abdication to the federal judiciary. “I expect,” he explained, “that the courts will resolve these legitimate legal questions as appropriate under the law.” And what of his own responsibility to resolve these questions as the principal officer sworn to defend the Constitution of the United States?  Nope. It was, he said, up to the judges to do what he lacked the gumption to do: reject infringement of the sovereign’s — the people’s — fundamental right to criticize their government.

But it gets worse. While the signing statement was no profile in courage, it did, at least potentially, throw down a gauntlet: Despite signing an unconstitutional bill, the president would be able to justify having his Justice Department oppose its most offensive elements.

Alas, it was not to be. The Justice Department, to the consternation of Bush supporters, has vigorously defended McCain-Feingold. That includes the case before the Supreme Court on Wednesday, in which Justice defends the law’s most noxious component — the very “issue advertising” ban President Bush purported to have “reservations” about. Under Attorney General Gonzales, the department remarkably argues that the First Amendment tolerates a scheme that prevents a charitable corporation from mentioning the name of an incumbent — not, mind you, electioneering against him, just mentioning his name — in the course of an issue ad on a matter of public policy in the weeks before an election.

“[A] representative democracy ceases to exist,” wrote Blackstone, “the moment that the public functionaries are by any means absolved from their responsibility to their constituents; and this happens whenever the constituent can be restrained in any manner from speaking, writing, or publishing his opinions upon any public measure, or upon the conduct of those who may advise or execute it.”  In the pageantry of a nonbinding signing statement, President Bush, tepidly, talked the Blackstone talk. But now, when it’s time to walk the walk, Gonzales’s Justice Department is not merely AWOL, it’s sleeping with the enemy.

The Reno DOJ was a different beast.

In the 1990s, Charles Thomas Dickerson, a sociopath, committed an armed bank robbery in Virginia. The police failed to give him rote Miranda warnings (to remain silent, to free legal counsel, etc.). But the self-incriminating statements he made to them were manifestly voluntary, which is all the Fifth Amendment ever required. Still, the trial judge suppressed his confession due to the Miranda violation.