Loyalty to the Republican party apparently has begun to eclipse loyalty to the law. With Scooter Libby, VP Cheney’s former Chief of Staff, now convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice, rallying around him has apparently started to become a litmus test of Republican loyalty.

Most of the Republican presidential candidates have avoided giving any sort of answer about whether Libby should be pardoned. Five of the eight candidates who were asked in the last debate wouldn’t give a straight answer because to say Libby should not be pardoned alienates the Republican conservative base and to say he should be pardoned alienates the rest of the country. Only Tom Tancredo, Jim Gilmore, and Ron Paul had the courage to take a clear position.

The GOP, which prides itself on being the law & order party where criminals get their due punishment and leniency is left to the bleeding-heart Democrats, is in an uproar that one of their former senior officials, now a felon, may actually have to serve time for perjury and obstruction of justice. It is notable that while loudly complaining about the unfairness of the sentence, very few have actually argued that he’s been wrongly convicted.

The same group of people who argued for impeachment of a sitting president for perjury and obstruction of justice related to a personal sexual adventure now argue that serving time for a conviction on the same charges related to an issue of national security is a travesty. William Kristol, staunch conservative that he is, undermines his own conservative credentials by questioning if President Bush is still to be respected if he won’t pardon Libby. How do conservatives who argue for the pardon expect anybody else to take them seriously about the rule of law when they don’t want it applied to one of their own? The International Herald Tribune even quotes conservatives with close ties to the administration about their incredulity.

I don’t understand it,” said David Frum, a former speechwriter for Bush who is now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group with close ties to the White House. “A lot of people in the conservative world are weighted down by the sheer, glaring unfairness here.”

A conservative with close ties to the administration, who requested anonymity to speak frankly, put it another way: “Letting Scooter go to jail would be a politically irrational symbol to the last chunk of the 29 percent upon which he stands,” a reference to the low percentage of Americans who tell pollsters they support Bush.

Perhaps it would be “politically irrational” but it would be legally rational. All the outcry and maneuvering for a pardon makes it appear like more of a quid pro quo where Libby takes one for the team and protects the administration and in return the President either commutes his sentence or pardons him.

As I explored in an earlier post, I used to think the most disturbing aspect of all this was that the Bush administration continues to value loyalty to fellow Bushies over loyalty to the law and the Constitution from which it flows. Now I’m even more disturbed that President Bush’s Republican base agrees with him and are using that as a litmus test of Republican loyalty as chronicled in the conservative blog, First Things.

Still, this much is true: From the moment Scooter Libby was indicted, all the way down to this moment of his sentencing, I have judged the character of many acquaintances in the worlds of writers, public intellectuals, and conservative politicians—their courage and their trustworthiness—by a simple measure: whether or not they stood up for Scooter Libby.