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By John Fortier
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Posted: 03/20/07 06:03 PM [ET] |
The attorney general will be leaving soon. The seeds for his departure were sown in the aftermath of President Bush’s reelection when a confident second-term White House sought to expand its reach. The fruit of scandal ripened when that expansion of power ran up against a resurgent Congress, local prerogatives and the sense that U.S. attorneys are not ordinary political appointees.
The two months after the 2004 election were the high point of the Bush administration. The election was a vindication for President Bush of all that he had been doing in the war on terror and in Iraq. Even though the final election result was close by historical standards in the popular and electoral college votes, Bush’s victory was clear. And President Bush was the reason for the highest turnout in many years — love him or hate him, you wanted to go to the polls to register your view.
With victory in such a high-stakes election and with increased Republican majorities in Congress, the White House had a right to be confident. In his first real personnel shakeup, President Bush tried to put his stamp on the executive branch by sending out his close and longtime White House confidants Condoleezza Rice, Margaret Spelling and Alberto Gonzales to head key departments. In the case of Gonzales, he would replace John Ashcroft, who was admired for catching flak for tough decisions, but was not viewed as a team player by the White House. Gonzales would be his antithesis, lower-key, but someone whose roots were planted so deeply in the Bush camp that there would be no surprises.
It was at this time that the plan was hatched to replace U.S. attorneys. While the details are still being filled in, we know that Gonzales, Harriet Miers, Karl Rove and others entertained the possibility of replacing all the U.S. attorneys, or at least some who were viewed as not executing administration priorities.
Leaving aside the specific reasons for dismissing the eight U.S. attorneys, the general motivation was to ensure that U.S. attorneys toed the administration line.
The moment of White House ascendancy passed quickly, but the plan was amazingly slow to develop. Almost two years later when it was finally executed, Bush had taken a tumble and members of Congress, even Republicans, were much less compliant to White House aims.
If U.S. attorneys were ordinary political appointees, this story would be not such a firestorm. Clearly, U.S. attorneys are appointed by presidents and can be removed by them as well, but they make legal decisions about whom to prosecute and must be given some independence of judgment. There is nothing wrong with the Justice Department setting broad prosecutorial priorities, but there is a need for U.S. attorneys to display impartiality beyond that of your garden-variety political appointee. If we discover that U.S. attorneys were dismissed because they were pursuing certain corruption cases too vigorously, the decisions were shameful.
U.S. attorneys are also not purely national figures. They sit in districts around the country. Often, but not always, they have roots in the district. Congressional tradition is for senators of the president’s party to have a strong say in who is appointed U.S. attorney in their state. The White House erred in centralizing the decision at the Justice Department and dismissing some U.S. attorneys who had strong champions in the Senate.
The administration is on solid legal ground in dismissing the group of eight. But it is losing politically because executive-branch power has ebbed since 2005, while that of the legislative has flowed. Attorney General Gonzales is being carried out on that tide.
Fortier is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. |
