Spiky again:

The Senate Judiciary Committee, for example, has already planned a hearing next month featuring the first public testimony of former Office of Legal Counsel chief Jack Goldsmith. A one-time administration stalwart, he became convinced that Gonzales and other administration officials were breaking the law in eavesdropping on conversations of U.S. residents without judicial warrants, according to multiple former department officials.

Thereby causing Gonzo to “visit” Ashcroft in his hospital bed:

It was Goldsmith’s advice that prompted then–deputy attorney general James Comey in March 2004 to refuse to approve a continuation of the surveillance program. That prompted Gonzales (then White House counsel) to make an extraordinary nighttime visit to Attorney General John Ashcroft’s hospital room in an unsuccessful effort to convince him to overrule Comey.

Well! A little something to look forward to!

UPDATE From another piece of near hagiography in Newsweek, we read more about Goldsmith, who was the compromise choice to head the OLC after Gonzo and Addington couldn’t get Ashcroft to hand the OLC over to torture-memo author John Yoo:

Goldsmith was actually the opposite of what his detractors imagined. For nine months, from October 2003 to June 2004, he had been the central figure in a secret but intense rebellion of a small coterie of Bush administration lawyers. Their insurrection, described to NEWSWEEK by current and former administration officials who did not wish to be identified discussing confidential deliberations, is one of the most significant and intriguing untold stories of the war on terror.

These Justice Department lawyers, backed by their intrepid boss Comey, had stood up to the hard-liners, centered in the office of the vice president, who wanted to give the president virtually unlimited powers in the war on terror. Demanding that the White House stop using what they saw as farfetched rationales for riding rough-shod over the law and the Constitution, Goldsmith and the others fought to bring government spying and interrogation methods within the law. They did so at their peril; ostracized, some were denied promotions, while others left for more comfortable climes in private law firms and academia. Some went so far as to line up private lawyers in 2004, anticipating that the president’s eavesdropping program would draw scrutiny from Congress, if not prosecutors. These government attorneys did not always succeed, but their efforts went a long way toward vindicating the principle of a nation of laws and not men.

The rebels were not whistle-blowers in the traditional sense. They did not want—indeed avoided—publicity. (Goldsmith confirmed public facts about himself but otherwise declined to comment. Comey also declined to comment.) They were not downtrodden career civil servants. Rather, they were conservative political appointees who had been friends and close colleagues of some of the true believers they were fighting against. They did not see the struggle in terms of black and white but in shades of gray—as painfully close calls with unavoidable pitfalls. They worried deeply about whether their principles might put Americans at home and abroad at risk. Their story has been obscured behind legalisms and the veil of secrecy over the White House. But it is a quietly dramatic profile in courage. (For its part the White House denies any internal strife. “The proposition of internal division in our fight against terrorism isn’t based in fact,” says Lea Anne McBride, a spokeswoman for Vice President Dick Cheney. “This administration is united in its commitment to protect Americans, defeat terrorism and grow democracy.”)

Well, maybe. Let’s not forget that these guys are all, well, Conservative. The fact that they’re not raving, drooling, undead assholes like Addington, Cheney, Yoo, Gonzo and the rest of ’em doesn’t make them any less assholes. They’re still Federalist Society operatives, and they still want to replace the Constitution with authoritarian rule. Sure, Saruman’s Uruk-hai are in favor of a lot more of the niceties than Sauron’s orcs. As a putatively not-insane winger writes:

The fact that Addington, Cheney, and by extension Bush managed to force out people like Goldsmith and Comey means that the legal consensus within the administration is way, way outside the legal mainstream.

It would be nice if we could find out just how far “outside” the mainstream these views are. Assuming that the Dems don’t roll over, wet themselves, and capitulate again—or, even worse, allow the Federalist Society to define what the mainstream is, instead of shoving the Overton window left and down.