The “Honest Eight Massacre”: something real, or just Democrats feeling their oats?

Here is a perspective on the U.S. Attorneys issue from my understanding of how the appointment and retention process has worked in the past.

As I understand it, for a long time there has been a partly unwritten working arrangement mutually accepted by the parties. It allows for some political reality behind who is serving in these extremely important positions, but with a great deal of restraint on both sides. That bipartisan restraint is supposed to allow each U.S. Attorney while in office to follow the law as he or she sees it. The U.S. Attorney “serves at the pleasure of the President” – not sure of the origin or formal stature of that wording, but it means that the President makes the appointment -- but with a Senate advise and consent role.

Generally, as a new President comes into office, or as an opening occurs at any time, the senior Senator from the state recommends a candidate to the president. That candidate is expected to be from the same party as the President, even if the Senator is not. This seems appropriate since the position is within the Executive branch, and the President should probably be entitled to populate those positions with people of the same general sympathies, even if, according to tradition reinforced by this power-sharing process, the occupant is generally expected to be recognized in the community as an outstanding lawyer whose first loyalty will be to the law, and not politics. The advise and consent approval by the Senate is almost always automatic.

The underlying evil in this case is that, once again, this radical, non-conservative Administration has jettisoned the tried-and-true bipartisan tradition based on mutual restraint by the parties – David Broder, you should be positively apoplectic over this -- and as with everything else it touches has attempted to politicize the office to such an extent as to guarantee partisan advantage. All of the fired U.S. Attorneys were Republicans appointed by Bush, but they either failed to use the office to go after Democrats sufficiently or were too upstanding not to indict Republicans who broke the law. In two cases, at least, pressure was applied to time indictments before closely contested House of Representatives elections in 2006, and anger was demonstrated towards when they refused to violate the law. They were fired about a month later, on December 7 to be exact.

The traditional process helped assure public respect for this extremely office with the power to investigate local officials. Once again, these people simply do not get that. In fact, Paul Krugman has publicized how lopsided the indictments of local Democrats vs. Republicans with the ones who were retained – almost 90% against Democrats. I have not yet seen good historical benchmarks on that, but that certainly seems extreme in light of the traditional appointment process. It adds tremendous weight to the usually specious claim by local law-breakers that an indictment is just a political witch-hunt. Do you see that now, Karl and Bill and Alberto? As pointed out earlier on this blog, Bill Clinton fired only two U.S. Attorneys after the initial appointments during his two terms, one who bit a topless dancer at a strip club, and one who tried to strangle a reporter asking questions he didn’t like. None was fired for being honest.

The secondary evil that is being investigated is just like the Libby-Plame matter: lying. Not to a grand jury or the FBI, but to the American people directly. Alberto Gonzales almost certainly lied through his teeth to create the wrong impression of minimal White House involvement. In fact, we now know that Karl Rove, Harriet Miers (remember her?) and George Bush himself were paying close attention to making sure these officers insufficiently loyal to Bush were, as Rove put it, “gone.”

If you can call these issues unimportant, we have a problem -- in Houston and everywhere else.