We briefly highlighted it yesterday, but this new report confirming the partisan hiring habits of Bush's Justice Department deserves more attention:
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.
As Steve Chapman writes in the Tribune today, the GOP and the Bush administration have embraced the dangerous notion that "every aspect of governance should serve the ends of the Republican Party." Scott Horton's invaluable story from the March issue of Harper's recaps in great detail how Bush degraded the Justice Department -- an agency that ostensibly exists to protect our civil rights:
Every new president comes to Washington with a policy agenda, of course, appointing officials in the expectation that they will implement that agenda. And especially since the end of the Sixties, such red-meat political issues as abortion, civil rights, and immigration policy have risen to the top of the law-enforcement agenda. This trend has caused controversy, as it should, but the controversy is nonetheless democratic. In recent years, though, these controversies have obscured a larger phenomenon. It is increasingly clear that Republicans have come to understand the Justice Department not as “the very foundation for a free society,” or even as a spoils system for issues-oriented voters, but rather as a machine that utilizes “evasion, cover-up, stonewalling, and duplicity,” among other techniques, to achieve the far more fundamental goal of taking and maintaining power.
While Barack Obama's stances on FISA and the Supeme Court's death penalty decision yesterday leave something to be desired, we can be certain that, if elected, he'll do his best to restore faith in the Justice Department and government more generally. And like most Americans, I'm ready for a president who will use government to protect the public good -- not manipulate it to the benefit of his party and his cronies.
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