The Revival Of Elian Gonzalez

Many observers have noted that Obama’s selection of Eric Holder as Attorney General and Greg Craig as White House Counsel has brought the deportation of young Elian Gonzalez to Cuba back into the news. Holder was deputy attorney general when federal agents broke down the door of Elian’s relatives in Miami and seized the boy at gunpoint. Craig represented Elian’s father, who had remained in Cuba when his wife and son escaped.

Now that Hillary is to be Secretary of State, however, it is worth pointing out that during that sad affair she executed one of the most colossal flip-flops of her career, a fact that has not been often noted. It was noted at the time, however, and since this article is apparently no longer readily available online I have decided to post the whole thing here:

Hillary Flip-Flops on Kids’ Rights

Wall Street Journal

April 27, 2000

By John S. Rosenberg.

Do children have legal standing to assert their own rights in opposition to their parents? That divisive question has roiled the presidential campaign, not only in Florida but across the nation.

No, I’m not talking about Elian. I’m referring to the case of 11-year-old Gregory K. In 1992 an Orlando juvenile court judge ruled that Gregory K could sue his own parents for what news reports described as “divorce.” Gregory K’s suit became a campaign issue because of several articles written by the young Hillary Rodham, in which the future first lady defended children’s rights apart from, and sometimes opposed to, their parents.

“And what does Hillary believe?” Pat Buchanan thundered to the Republican Convention that year. “Well, Hillary believes that 12-year-olds should have the right to sue their parents!”

And indeed she does — or at least did. In a 1973 article in the Harvard Educational Review, she argued that “the presumption of identity of interests between parents and their children should be rejected whenever the child has interests demonstrably independent of those of his parents.”

Which brings us back to Elian. Does the provision of the immigration statute providing that “any alien . . . irrespective of such alien’s status, may apply for asylum” apply to children, as the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week suggested it did? Mrs. Clinton’s writings clearly support Elian’s standing to assert his own interests in court, but the Senate candidate and first lady has changed her tune.

The question of Elian’s competency, of how much weight should be attached to his preferences, is distinguishable from the question of whether his interests are different from his father’s. Even on the question of competency, however, Mrs. Clinton is on record opposing the assumption that children have no standing. “The first thing to be done is to reverse the presumption of incompetency and instead assume all individuals are competent until proven otherwise,” she wrote in a 1979 article.

One wonders if the president recalls Gregory K, who ultimately won his suit against his parents, or his wife’s writings. Apparently not, for on April 20 in the Rose Garden, when he was asked his view of the 11th Circuit’s suggestion that Elian has interests and rights at odds with his father’s, the president responded that any such conclusion would be “a dramatic departure from the law.” Neither he nor his wife has mentioned that for years that is precisely what she called for.

Nor, for that matter, have some conservatives acknowledged that before Elian they stood foursquare for parental rights. But conservatives at least have a plausible explanation for making an exception of Elian: Not to do so would be to consign an innocent boy to life under a totalitarian regime in which neither adults nor children have any rights.

It’s harder to understand why Mrs. Clinton and other liberals would abandon their principles in this case. Do they think Cuba is free? Do they think the difference between freedom and communism is not important enough to create divergent interests between parent and child? Or do they want Elian deported for purely political reasons?

Whatever the reasons, standing by her man one more time, in what will probably be the postimpeachment Clinton presidency’s defining moment, Hillary has abandoned the very values and arguments on which she built her legal and intellectual reputation.

Citing this piece a couple of years later (July 2002), I wrote (here):

There were those (I was one) who regarded the deportation of Elian as akin to a slave mother drowning as she swam to freedom with her child only to have the child ripped from his relatives in the North and returned to his loyal Uncle Tom father who, when offered freedom with his son, chose to remain on the plantation. Anyone who felt that way then who does not protest to the State Department now is guilty of Hillary-class hypocrisy.

If there are any Senators who still feel that way, they may want to ask Hillary and Holder if they feel any remorse over their roles in sending Elian back to Cuba.