Outcry over Judicial Politicization “Scandal” Is Overblown
July 28th, 2008
The Department of Justice, which is run by a president’s political appointees, is and always will be “politicized.” Internal rules and laws are designed to minimize undue politicization, often without success. During the Clinton administration, we saw the wholesale firing of all US attorneys. Then we saw Janet Reno, a local politician plucked out of elected office in Florida, allow the Justice Department to be pushed around by the White House. Under Reno, the Justice Department became an arm of the White House Counsel’s office, guided by associates of Hillary Clinton, such as the disgraced Webster Hubbell.
Conservatives in any Republican administration face an entrenched, often ideologically hostile bureaucracy. The Bush administration, for reasons both known and unknown (even to Bush appointees), sought new blood in some US Attorney positions. This non-scandal and its subsequent bungling exposed the ineptitude of Attorney General Gonzales, which gave ammunition to entrenched DOJ bureaucrats who worked with a newly empowered Democratic congressional majority to attack any effort to bring more conservative thinking to the various Justice bureaucratic fiefdoms.
Conservatives should understand that they will always be expected to follow the rules and that liberals will get a pass for violating the rules. One can bemoan the double standard, but to violate the law and bypass proper hiring procedures simply because liberals during the Clinton years (and other Democratic administrations) may have done it is no excuse. One shouldn’t replace liberal hacks with “conservative” hacks.
In the typical Republican administration, the Justice Department is bound to be a battleground between conservatives and the liberal bureaucracy.
What next? In any Democratic administration, I would expect an unprecedented purge of perceived conservatives hired during the prior Republican administration. And not a peep of outrage from the mainstream press or Democrats in Congress.
–Tom Fitton, President
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