Thursday, March 01, 2007
Firing US Attorneys
This article by Andrew McCarthy ran a few weeks ago, but its relevance still holds in the Democrats attempt to play politics with the Justice Department's change of a few US Attorneys around the country.
In lambasting the Bush administration for politicizing the appointment of the nation’s United States attorneys, Democrats may be on the verge of redefining chutzpah.
The campaign is being spearheaded on the Judiciary Committee by Senator Dianne Feinstein. She contends that at least seven U.S. attorneys — tellingly, including those for two districts in her home state — have been “forced to resign without cause.” They are, she further alleges, to be replaced by Bush appointees who will be able to avoid Senate confirmation thanks to a “little known provision” of the Patriot Act reauthorization law enacted in 2006.
Going into overdrive, Feinstein railed on the Senate floor Tuesday that “[t]he public response has been shock. Peter Nunez, who served as the San Diego U.S. Attorney from 1982 to 1988 has said, ‘This is like nothing I’ve ever seen in my 35-plus years.’”
Yes, the public, surely, is about as “shocked, shocked” as Claude Raines’s Captain Renault, and one is left to wonder whether Mr. Nunez spent the 1990s living under a rock.
One of President Clinton’s very first official acts upon taking office in 1993 was to fire every United States attorney then serving — except one, Michael Chertoff, now Homeland Security secretary but then U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, who was kept on only because a powerful New Jersey Democrat, Sen. Bill Bradley, specifically requested his retention.
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Indeed, a moment’s reflection on the terms served by U.S. attorneys reveals the emptiness of Feinstein’s argument. These officials are appointed for four years, with the understanding that they serve at the pleasure of the president, who can remove them for any reason or no reason. George W. Bush, of course, has been president for six years. That means every presently serving U.S. attorney in this country has been appointed or reappointed by this president.
That is, contrary to Clinton, who unceremoniously cashiered virtually all Reagan and Bush 41 appointees, the current President Bush can only, at this point, be firing his own appointees. Several of them, perhaps even all of them, are no doubt highly competent. But it is a lot less unsavory, at least at first blush, for a president to be rethinking his own choices than to be muscling out another administration’s choices in an act of unvarnished partisanship.
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There is much more.
The Democrats' attempt to politicize the selection of US Attorneys is pretty strange and they have made little headway with whatever case they are attempting to make. In one some cases they say the attorney was good at prosecuting Republicans and in another they make the claim that the attorney refused to prosecute Democrats which makes him a hero too. So there point appears to be that prosecutors who go after Republicans are sound public servants as are those who refuse to go after Democrats. So how do they feel about the non prosecution of William Jefferson, Democrat, Louisiana? |
