Politics & Power Quote by Barbara Mikulski

Mikulski frames her opposition to Alberto Gonzales as a referendum on whether law itself will be treated like campaign material. The triple repetition of "play politics" is doing more than emphasizing a point; it’s a prosecutorial drumbeat, turning a personnel vote into an indictment of a governing style. By the third beat, the charge has widened from domestic legal maneuvering to the international rules that allegedly safeguard American troops. That escalation matters: it relocates an inside-the-Beltway confirmation fight into the moral territory of duty of care toward service members, where partisan gamesmanship reads as negligence.

The question form is a classic Senate move, inviting listeners to answer before she does. It’s also a trap: who wants an Attorney General who politicizes courts and treaties? Mikulski’s "Do we want..". pulls the audience into collective responsibility, then she pivots to "I do not", claiming the steadiness that the nominee, by implication, lacks. The rhetoric casts her vote as refusal to participate in corruption-by-normalization.

Context is the early Bush-era clash over executive power and legal justifications for counterterror policy, when Gonzales’s name was tied to arguments that seemed to treat international constraints as optional. By invoking "international conventions designed to protect our troops", Mikulski flips the usual partisan script that paints such treaties as handcuffs on America. Her subtext: weakening the rules doesn’t make us safer; it makes our soldiers more vulnerable by eroding reciprocity and legitimacy. It’s political language aimed at de-politicizing the justice system - and she knows the irony.