The Politicization of the Department of Justice
Amidst the jubilation, calls to reinstate the rule of law, and speculation about replacements that have flooded the media in response to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s recent resignation, I keep thinking of the old joke: How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: One … but the light bulb has to want to change.
So it is with the Bush-Cheney administration’s Justice Department. It can only be changed for the better if George W. Bush and Dick Cheney want such a change. And they most fervently do not — at least not if you construe the term “for the better” to mean returning the Department of Justice (DOJ) to its former status as an agency that strives to fairly and independently enforce the law on behalf of the people of the United States.
The truth is, the high-level decay and politicization of the DOJ that has been so starkly exposed in the past months did not begin with the arrival of Alberto Gonzales in 2005. It began with the arrival of Bush and Cheney in January of 2001. From the moment they moved into the White House, they set about to pervert the functions of the office of the attorney general to advance not only their own personal and political agendas, but also those of the Republican National Committee. To achieve that cynical aim, they elevated their inexperienced politicos to key positions at DOJ’s main offices in Washington, DC and gave them free rein to ignore, undermine, overrule and mistreat career attorneys. Consequently, by the end of 2004, many of the most experienced DOJ attorneys had left. But they left quietly, so the public didn’t pay much attention. Having quite successfully cleared the way for its political agenda at Main Justice, the administration could then move on to the politicization of US attorney offices around the country. This process — which began in 2005 and led to the much-publicized US attorney firings — was not the beginning of the chief executive’s unprecedented injection of politics into the operation of the DOJ; it was actually the second phase of the project.
From day one, the Bush-Cheney administration has been engaged in an intentional waste of the DOJ — and every other agency in the executive branch — that is not going to stop as long as they remain in office, no matter who they choose to be the attorney general.
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