The Real Damage of the Bush Administration
...is the many attempts to subvert the bureaucracy, exemplified by this. I've often heard the apologetic that explains the stuffing of the bureaucracy with conservative activists as okay "because each administration does it", but that's patently not true. This is just another example of the methods used to extend Presidential powers and make the Judiciary less independent.
Justice Department officials over the last six years illegally used “political or ideological” factors to hire new lawyers into an elite recruitment program, tapping law school graduates with conservative credentials over those with liberal-sounding resumes, a new report found Tuesday.The blistering report, prepared by the Justice Department’s inspector general, is the first in what will be a series of investigations growing out of last year’s scandal over the firings of nine United States attorneys. It appeared to confirm for the first time in an official examination many of the allegations from critics who charged that the Justice Department had become overly politicized during the Bush administration.
“Many qualified candidates” were rejected for the department’s honors program because of what was perceived as a liberal bias, the report found. Those practices, the report concluded, “constituted misconduct and also violated the department’s policies and civil service law that prohibit discrimination in hiring based on political or ideological affiliations.”
The shift began in 2002, when advisers to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft restructured the honors program in response to what some officials saw as a liberal tilt in recruiting young lawyers from elite law schools like Harvard and Yale. While the recruitment was once controlled largely by career officials in each section who would review applications, political officials in the department began to assume more control, rejecting candidates with liberal or Democratic affiliations “at a significantly higher rate” than those with Republican or conservative credentials, the report said.
As if it needs repeating, the Bush Administration is in no way "business as usual" in American politics. We're only now starting to turn up some of these rocks, and it's not a partisan judgement - this is an *internal* report from the Justice Department itself.
Another reason Bush will go down as one of the worst Presidents ever.
Extremism in the defense of liberty *is* a vice. It has been since the first Crown Loyalist was tarred, feathered and set afire, and it's no better now. It corrupts first the individual, then ultimately the institution it defends.
If I hadn't been so fired up about Exxon, I would have posted about this. There's an NPR broadcast about this that was pretty good. They dug up an Administration defender who argued that hiring Republicans was part of a diversity initiative. Really incredible stuff: some people were rejected because they donated to The Nature Conservancy.
I assume that the next Administration, whoever heads it up, will not be as partisan. What I'm curious about is how far people will go to clean up the damage from this kind of thing. You can't get rid of Article III judges, but rank-and-file bureaucrats are at-will employees.
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While clearly extremely significant, there's so much to choose from I feel it's a bit premature to point at any one thing as "the real damage" of the Bush presidency without a few years' distance.
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
The one that that is real damage is just the wide spread rape of our country and others in everything they touched.
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I'm with you on this. Pointing out one thing as the "one thing" is a bit like making much of one of Jeff Dahlmer's murders.
There is only an up or down--up to a man's age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order--or down to the ant heap totalitarianism,... those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.
So if the normal thing is to keep them all on, do you think (assuming Obama wins) Obama would keep them all on, or would he clean house and put his own people in?
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That's an interesting question. On one hand, you'd hope he wouldn't turn it into a precedent. On the other hand, we now know that the whole lot is currently filled with people chosen to be partisan wackos. Would you want to keep them all around, even knowing that they were actively working against you?
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Well he wants to look "bipartisan," doesn't he? If Obama wins the conservatives will feel like they're owed some sort of consolation, and if Obama kicks the old guard out then anyone he picks will be considered "too liberal."
NOTE: This is not a doodle bug.
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I think it is entirely possible that Obama may actually be afforded the convenience of a supermajority in both houses of Congress. If that occurs he will be the most powerful Democratic president since FDR. Considering the hash of things the Bush/Delay crew made of things in the last decade, we're sort of getting what we richly deserve. If that does happen, it wouldn't surprise me to see Pelosi quoting Brennus of Gaul:
There is only an up or down--up to a man's age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order--or down to the ant heap totalitarianism,... those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.
The DOJ jobs that were filled with partisans, at least the ones referenced in the article, are career track positions. Usually people stay in them for quite a while and don't get fired when the White House changes hands. However, their bosses the United States Attorney Generals for each jurisdiction, are political patronage jobs that do change hands, and they're the people who set the agenda for what the office will focus on. USAG jobs usually change when the administration changes.
So assuming the administration changes, even if there are a bunch of Assistant United States Attorney Generals who belong to the KKK (extreme example), if they're told to go out and prosecute hate crimes, they pretty much have to do that or lose their jobs. I think the long-term effects of filling the positions with partisans will be limited, except that the overall talent level of AUSAs has gone down since selection was based on party affiliation rather than merit. It's just the notion that the current White House would do this that offends me.
Further mitigation: this sort of thing has always happened even with AUSAs, but never as systemic as this. One former Minnesota USAG during the Clinton Administration certainly went out of the way to recruit ethnically diverse candidates, but not nearly on the scale that the Bush administration has done here.
"All that time you waste dating and having sex could be better spent scouring the web for new game developer press releases." - Quintin_Stone
I doubt the people they chose as AUSAs are really much more under qualified than the people they chose not to accept based on political orientation. It's not like they stopped hiring people with a liberal lean either, they were just rejected at a higher rate. I don't know the specifics, but I'd imagine it was a situation where if all things were equal (or very close to it) they'd choose the conservative (or not outwardly liberal) candidate. I suppose I don't put it past them to have been so blatantly stupid, but I'd like to believe they're not.
Fletcher wrote:
Here's the report. I haven't read all of it, but Chart 3 on page 22 is pretty interesting. Candidates got through an initial merits-based screen and then were "deselected" at statistically significant rates based on ideology. So you are correct that everybody who got hired had to have at least some stone-cold legal skillz, but very few liberals got hired.
http://media.npr.org/documents/2008/jun/doj_hiring.pdf
"All that time you waste dating and having sex could be better spent scouring the web for new game developer press releases." - Quintin_Stone
Thanks for the link. That is really interesting stuff. I skimmed most of it, but it seems pretty obvious that if you were able to be labeled as liberal or helped on the campaign of a democratic candidate you had almost no shot at even getting an interview. I'd be interested to see if the actual hiring process after the interview had the same kinds of discrimination.
Fletcher wrote:
This report almost reads like a cut and paste of the procedures used for awarding Iraq War reconstruction contracts. The Coalition Provisional Authority was pretty much just a massive pork barrel make work program for Young Republicans and recent grads from Christian colleges.
There is only an up or down--up to a man's age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order--or down to the ant heap totalitarianism,... those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.
The issue that I'm referring to as the "real damage" is that of the massive restructuring of the bureaucracy to polarize it at the professional level, rather than just at the level of political appointees. It's not just DoJ, it's *every* major Department of the government. Further, it ties together with the truly massive rules-changing that effectively legislates without the benefit of Congress, and what we have is essentially a behind-the-scenes attempt to reconstruct government itself according to the Neoconservative vision. This is *structural* damage that will linger unless reversed, and while everyone argues about judges "legislating from the bench", it's much more common for Bush's Executive branch to change laws through proclamation - and far more damaging.
So to me, the DoJ is the visible tip of the iceberg, and we've only begun to explore it. Similar reports exist from other parts of government that have not yet gotten full investigations. If we don't deal with this, it will be a time bomb, just as the subversion of the Federal judiciary is (even Reagan didn't try to stack judges based solely on conservative credentials; Bush here again has crossed into new territory with ruthlessly partisan appointments, in the hopes of changing the nature of the judiciary for decades to come, even if the Executive and Legislative branches be lost to Republicans for a time.)
Extremism in the defense of liberty *is* a vice. It has been since the first Crown Loyalist was tarred, feathered and set afire, and it's no better now. It corrupts first the individual, then ultimately the institution it defends.
Interesting. Apparently being highly qualified has a well-known liberal bias. [/Colbert]
Snark aside, I am deeply suspicious of anyone who can be passionately involved in something as deeply tied into politics as the law, and yet somehow remain blissfully neutral. (Edit: Liberal/Conservative/Neutral here is taken from association with or participation in various external groups, and therefore makes a lot more sense.) Damn lawyers and their beige alerts.
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It's not that the people themselves have no opinion either way, it's just not obviously discernible from their resumes.
I don't know about you, but I don't have my political affiliation on my resume.
Fletcher wrote:
I don't think it comes from the resume, Kaos. I'm pretty sure that for DoJ, you'd be looking at low-level clearances, and that would bring out any groups you belong to in the application process.
Extremism in the defense of liberty *is* a vice. It has been since the first Crown Loyalist was tarred, feathered and set afire, and it's no better now. It corrupts first the individual, then ultimately the institution it defends.
Jesus they put a horse trainer in charge of FEMA. Does anything this band of morons did really surprise anyone?