The Cabinet: Not So Happy New Year.(George W. Bush's cabinet nominations)(Brief Article)

The rush of almost holiday cheer that conservatives felt when George W. Bush's cabinet nominations were first announced ended when one of the best of them, Linda Chavez, came under fire for giving shelter to an illegal alien, and Team Bush gallantly let her bleed.

Pundits loosely compared Ms. Chavez's situation to that of Zoe Baird, nominated by Bill Clinton to be attorney general. The situations were actually quite different. Baird employed a Peruvian couple, both illegal aliens, to be her nanny and driver. Chavez took in Marta Mercado, a battered Guatemalan woman. Both Chavez and Mercado insist that Mercado, despite occasionally helping around the house and being helped monetarily, was not an employee-a claim confirmed by National Review's John Miller, who worked with Chavez at the time and frequently saw Mercado at her home. As far as the politics of immigration is concerned, America's problem is as much historically high levels of legal immigrants, as high levels of illegal ones; and the solution, as NR wrote at the time of the Baird flap, is not to make ordinary citizens "unpaid IRS [and INS] agents," but to set reasonable levels, to police the borders, and to use more efficiently the INS machinery we already have.

Chavez herself admits that she did not tell the Bush transition team about the potential Mercado problem. That breaks a key law of Washington, which is doubly important in the decalogue of the Bush family: full exposure, and loyalty to the team. George W. Bush errs, however, if he focuses too exclusively on these criteria. He ...