US Attorneys and integrity

Gene Lyons offers a reality-based view of the importance of integrity in the justice system in Where loyalty is a one-way street Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 03/28/07:

For Republicans, here’s the clearest lesson from the U. S. attorney purge: To the Bush administration, loyalty is a one-way street. All successful politicians shed embarrassing associates, but with George W. Bush it’s not necessary to be a liability to get trashed. Being inconvenient to one of Karl Rove’s power plays will suffice. Rove’s machinations are wrecking the GOP. Fully 68 percent in a USA Today / Gallup poll think White House officials should testify to Congress under oath; the 24 percent who don’t represent Bush dead-enders. Rigging the Patriot Act to evade the Senate’s advice and consent in choosing federal prosecutors was sure to backfire. Senators of both parties are jealous of their prerogatives. Not coming clean was bone stupid. When the attorney general’s aides start pleading the Fifth Amendment, things can only get worse. Treating U. S. attorneys like fry cooks at a fast-food joint was idiotic. Tell all the lawyer jokes you want. The ethical code that governs the legal profession guards fundamental American rights and freedoms. Here in Arkansas, two recent Republican U. S. attorneys have dealt with politically loaded situations demanding integrity and courage. Both did exactly the right thing under extreme pressure. Although I’ve voted against both men and may do so again, I have nothing but respect for their honor. (my emphasis)

It's a sad, sad commentary on the state of the American media landscape that a sensible, careful journalist and commentator like Gene Lyons appears in a small local Arkansas paper. While frivolous clowns like David Broder (aka, the Dean of All The Pundits) and David Brooks are considered very serious Big Pundits. Very, very sad. Gene Lyons puts more sensible commentary in one column than Dean Broder cranks out in an entire year - and that's probably giving the Dean too much credit.

Tags: attorney purge, establishment press, gene lyons, mainstream press, us attorney purge

John Dean on the US Attorneys purge

John Dean, White House counsel under Nixon and author of Conservatives Without Conscience (2006) writes about New Developments in the U.S. Attorney Controversy: Why Bush Refuses to Allow Karl Rove and Harriet Miers to Testify Before Congress, and What Role New White House Counsel Fred Fielding May Play Findlaw.com 03/23/07. (His Findlaw articles have long titles.) First, the spoiler:

Bush's greatest problem here, however, is Harriett Miers. ... I doubt she is ready to go to prison for him; and all who know her say if she is under oath, she will not lie. That could be a problem.

Telling the truth about Bush, Cheney and Rove. That could be a problem! Dean also thinks Karl Rove could wind up in the pokey over this. And he writes:

In truth, much more is at stake here for both the Congress and the White House than this bare description of the conflict would indicate. These issues strike at the heart of what post-Watergate conservative Republicans seek to create: an all-powerful presidency. Thus, for the same reason that Vice President Cheney went to extreme lengths to block Congress from getting information about the work of his National Energy Task Force ... I expect President Bush to take what will appear to be a similar irrational posture. For both Bush and Cheney, virtually any limit on presidential power is too great.

And this conflict, in the end, is all about presidential power. Moreover, underlying the Administration's defense of unchecked power, is a term that has not been heard since Justice Alito's confirmation hearings: "the unitary executive theory." (my emphasis)

Dean also writes of the Executive privilege argument:

I have never been an advocate of executive privilege, except as it might relate to the most sensitive national security information. To the contrary, you show me a White House aide who does not want his conversations and advice to the president revealed, and I will show you someone who should not be talking with or advising a president.

Tags: attorney purge, bush, john dean, unilateral executive, unitary executive

Abu Gonzalez' US Attorney purge and the degeneration of the Republican Party

Cracker legend Theodore Bilbo

Josh Marshall, whose TalkingPointsMemo blog operation has taken a key role in driving the US Attorneys purge story, wrote in a post of 03/21/07:

Back up a bit from the sparks flying over executive privilege and congressional testimony and you realize that these are textbook cases of the party in power interfering or obstructing the administration of justice for narrowly partisan purposes. It's a direct attack on the rule of law.

This much is already clear in the record. ... But in this case [the Executive privelege claim] is being used as no more than a shield to keep the full extent of the president's perversion of the rule of law from becoming known.

It's yet another example of how far this White House has gone in normalizing behavior that we've been raised to associate with third-world countries where democracy has never successfully taken root and the rule of law is unknown. At most points in our history the idea that an Attorney General could stay in office after having overseen such an effort would be unthinkable. The most telling part of this episode is that they're not even really denying the wrongdoing. They're ignoring the point or at least pleading 'no contest' and saying it's okay. (my emphasis)

But there was a time and a place where this kind of behavior was the norm in the United States: the crassy politicized justice, ignoring the rule of law, rampant crony capitalism, massive governmental corruption, rank dishonesty in government, and swaggering arrogance on the part of public executives.

It was in the American South during the segregation decades. The governments of Mississippi under Ross Barnett, or Arkansas under Orville Faubus, to take just two examples, operated much like this. But it's not that they were exceptional in that. It was more-or-less the way that segregation governments worked. Those with notably more integrity were the exceptions.

Today's Republican Party is the hell-spawn of the marriage of Nixonian cynicism to segregationist cracker politics, the mature result of Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" started nearly four decades ago.

Tags: attorney purge, authoritarianism, republican party