Bush Administration fires U.S. attorneys
The Bush Administration recently fired seven U.S. attorneys. Firing a U.S. attorney is a drastic and rare action usually taken only in extraordinary circumstances (by comparison, of the 486 U.S. attorneys appointed between 1981 and 2006, only 3 were fired). The seven fired U.S. attorneys had solid resumes and good records, and some were replaced by candidates with weaker credentials but strong Republican connections. Particularly alarming was the dismissal of H.E. Cummins, a distinguished and well-respected U.S. attorney in Little Rock, Arkansas. Mr. Cummins was replaced with J. Timothy Griffin, a former deputy to Karl Rove who has limited legal experience but did opposition research for the Republican National Committee.
The position of U.S. attorney is a powerful and prestigious post; U.S. attorneys prosecute headline-grabbing cases involving terrorism, corporate misgovernance, corruption, and other high-profile crimes. U.S. attorneys have traditionally been insulated from political pressures and executive meddling, but Bush’s recent purges were made possible by a little-known provision of the Patriot Act that allows the president to appoint interim U.S. attorneys for an indefinite period without Senate confirmation. Adam Cohen’s column in the New York Times suggests three theories for this “political purge”:
1. Helping friends. Ms. Lam (one of the fired attorneys) had already put one powerful Republican congressman in jail and was investigating other powerful politicians. The Justice Department, unpersuasively, claims that it was unhappy about Ms. Lam’s failure to bring more immigration cases. Meanwhile, Ms. Lam has been replaced with an interim prosecutor whose résumé shows almost no criminal law experience, but includes her membership in the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group.
2. Candidate recruitment. U.S. attorney is a position that can make headlines and launch political careers. Congressional Democrats suspect that the Bush administration has been pushing out long-serving U.S. attorneys to replace them with promising Republican lawyers who can then be run for Congress and top state offices.
3. Presidential politics. The Justice Department concedes that Mr. Cummins was doing a good job in Little Rock. An obvious question is whether the administration was more interested in his successor’s skills in opposition political research — let’s not forget that Arkansas has been lucrative fodder for Republicans in the past — in time for the 2008 elections.
One of the greatest aspects of the system of government established by our founding fathers is the seperation of powers into executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. No branch of government can amass too much power, and each branch acts as a check on the other branches. The process of appointing federal judges and U.S. attorneys (Presidential nomination followed by Congressional confirmation) is an important element of this separation of powers. The magnitude of Bush’s successful attempt to bypass the process can’t be understated. The Patriot Act’s sweeping expansions of executive power have enabled Bush to install cronies in powerful positions with the authority to investigate and prosecute (or, more importantly, the authority to refrain from doing so). These developments are alarming not only because of these immediate consequences, but because of the precedent they set in upsetting the delicate balance of authority that is a hallmark of American democracy. Though such excesses would normally be regarded as policies unbecoming of the United States, they seem to have become a sad reality of life under the Bush Administration.