When I was a senior in college I did an internship at the Minnesota State Legislature. I was required to send back weekly reports to the professor in charge. My first report expressed awe at the wheeling and dealing going on and the fact that some legislators would say one thing to one crowd and then the exact opposite to another crowd. My professor read this letter to his freshman American Government class. I had expressed shock that politicians were engaging in politics.
This is the point of Charles Krauthammer's piece on the U.S. Attorney non-scandal. Krauthammer is no doubt right. In what is a theme with the Bush Administration, Alberto Gonzales is not a crook, he's just incompetent. It should not be surprising that U.S. Attorneys, who are political appointees, should be replaced for political reasons. As I have stated a million times, politics means both disagreements over our nation's priorities and mere partisanship. Clearly Republicans have different priorities regarding crime than do Democrats. That's part of what makes Republicans Republicans and Democrats Democrats. Are the administration's critics shocked that Solicitor Generals act in a political way? Are they not law enforcement officers? But of course we expect George Bush's Solicitor General to have different priorities than Bill Clinton's. They are political appointees. Unless there is evidence that the administration was actually trying to use at USAG's to punish political enemies or reward friends, there is nothing here. Right now the Democrats are using the lack of evidence of such activities to go on a fishing expedition. But as former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy points out, a change in USAG's rarely has any effect on prosecutions.
Powerline has more. You mean in politics (and in life) people make connections and use them to advance their careers? Shocking!
Update: Chad, in the usual tolerant and open minded manner befitting his liberal sensibilities, calls me "utterly stupid" and "a dolt." I guess that means Krauthammer is, too. Let me quote my fellow moron:
For example, both voter intimidation and voter fraud are illegal. The Democrats have a particular interest in the former because they see it diminishing their turnout, while Republicans are particularly interested in the latter because they see it as inflating the Democratic tally. The Bush administration apparently was dismayed that some of these fired attorneys were not vigorous enough in pursuing voter fraud.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. Pursuing voter fraud is not, as The New York Times pretends, a euphemism for suppressing the vote of minorities and poor people. It is a mechanism for suppressing the vote of (among other phantoms) dead people. Conservatives have a healthy respect for the opinion of dead people -- conservatives revere tradition, which Chesterton once defined as "the democracy of the dead'' -- but they draw the line at posthumous voting.
If the White House decides that a U.S. attorney is showing insufficient zeal in pursuing voter fraud -- or the death penalty or illegal immigration or drug dealing -- it has the perfect right to fire him.
When a Democrat wins the White House in 2008 and fires US Attorneys who would rather prosecute voter fraud rather than voter intimidation, will Chad scream bloody murder? I doubt it. He'll call it fighting for justice. Does Chad have any evidence that an on going investigation has been sabotaged (Krauthammer's phrase) because of these firings? If so, pray present it. We'd all be interested. Here is Andrew McCarthy, again:
We are not, after all, dealing with a crime when U.S. attorneys are dismissed — at least as long as it was not done to obstruct investigations, which is highly unlikely. (Day-to-day investigations are conducted by career prosecutors, not the district U.S. attorney; cases routinely continue when there is a change in U.S. attorneys; and, to date, there is no credible suggestion, despite the reams of email, that these dismissals targeted individual cases rather than individual prosecutors.)
I will point out that this pseudo-scandal never would have happened if the Bush White House did not have a pathological distrust of the other branches of government.
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