A quick student of the Times, Cohen asked Goodling, “The mission of the law school you attended, Regent, is to bring to bear upon legal education and the legal profession the will of almighty God, our creator. What is the will of almighty God, our creator, on the legal profession?”
Goodling seemed perplexed. “I’m not sure that I could define that question for you,” she said.
“Did you ask people who applied for jobs as [assistant U.S. attorneys] anything about their religion?”
“No, I certainly did not.”
“Ever had religion discussions come up?”
“Not to the best of my recollection.”
Cohen pressed. Hasn’t the Justice Department hired an unusually large number of graduates of Regent?
“I think we have a lot more people from Harvard and Yale,” said Goodling.
“That’s refreshing,” said Cohen, a graduate of the University of Memphis School of Law. “Is it a fact — are you aware of the fact that in your graduating class 50 to 60 percent of the students failed the bar the first time?”
At that point, hisses and hoots began to be rise from the Republican side of the dais, and, for just a moment at least, 2141 Rayburn sounded a bit like the House of Commons. Goodling assured Cohen that she had passed the bar the first time around.
What was particularly odd about the moment, at least for a hearing not devoted to the state of U.S schools, was that it was the second time the subject of higher education had come up in the space of just a few minutes. Earlier, Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee was very concerned that Goodling had asked about the political leanings of a job seeker named Seth Adam Meinero, “a graduate of Howard University, one of the top, outstanding law schools in the nation.” (Rep. Cohen did not protest, even though Howard’s bar-passing statistics don’t measure up to Regent’s.) Goodling said she regretted making a “snap judgment” about Meinero’s supposed political leanings, although she stressed that Meinero ultimately got the job he was seeking.
Rep. Jackson Lee also caused a few observers to scratch their heads when she opened her questioning of Goodling this way: “Allow me just to simply begin a series of questions, Ms. Goodling, and I would ask that they — your answers — be as cryptic and as brief as possible, however truthful, because we do have a shortened period of time.”
“Cryptic?” whispered one reporter. “Did she say cryptic? I think she did.”
Indeed she did. But Goodling did not follow Rep. Jackson Lee’s directions. In fact, her answers were quite clear and direct.
That is, when she got the opportunity to answer the questions put to her. Later in the hearing, Jackson Lee, by then taking a temporary turn in the chairman’s seat, had to restrain fellow Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison, who was so anxious to question Goodling that he seemed uninterested in her answers.
“So you all bypassed a chief of [the Civil Division] and went to somebody who had no experience in management simply because they were a liberal?” Ellison asked Goodling.
“No, not at all,” she answered. “There were other reasons involved in the decision.”
“Now — “
“To clarify, we — “
“No, I don’t need a clarification,” Ellison said. “Thank you, ma’am.”
“Well, I would like to complete my answer.”
“Well, I don’t need an answer.”
THE ROVIAN PLOTThrough it all, Goodling remained remarkably poised, perhaps surprisingly so in light of press reports that had her bursting into tears with some frequency during her Justice Department days. For hours Wednesday, she sat erect on the edge of her chair, her hands, occasionally trembling, clasped just out of sight below the witness table.
But just because Goodling handled herself well did not mean the U.S. attorneys mess became any easier to understand as a result of her testimony. Throughout the day, Goodling maintained that she was a small-time player in the firings; she didn’t know why, exactly, the U.S. attorneys were canned. In that respect, her answers resembled those of her old boss, Attorney General Gonzales, who has also testified that he didn’t know why, exactly, the U.S. attorneys were canned.
The dismaying possibility in all this is that both are telling the truth. Democrats, intent on finding an all-encompassing Rovian plot behind the firings, will never accept that possibility that the U.S. attorney firings were done in a manner that was so slipshod, so halting, and so pointless that nobody quite knew what was going on. But that may be just what happened. Whatever their partisan motivation, Democrats are trying to impose a logical template on events. In the end, they may be doomed to fail.
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