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Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007

What’s the Big Deal, Anyway?

Matthew of Defective Yeti  has written up a primer on the US Attorney purge. Several pundits are pushing the talking points that US attorneys are political appointments, so firing them for partisan political advantage shouldn’t raise any eyebrows at all.

The technical term for this is bullshit. 

While it’s true that the appointments themselves are political and raise no eyebrows, once in office, the US attorneys are enjoined to be impartial in their practice and their execution of justice. Think of US attorneys as DAs or prosecutors–and then look at the stories again.

What we’re talking about is a Senator calling up a prosecutor attorney and trying to get him to speak about sealed documents and rush an indictment to help win an election. When the prosecutor refused, he was fired shortly after. Can I raise one eyebrow on that, maybe?

In two other cases (Carol Lam and the guy in Guam in the first term), prosecutors were fired in the midst of wide reaching corruption investigations involving close, personal friends of the White House.  In the case of Guam, the investigation was halted immediately by the replacement; we’re still waiting for the results of Lam’s replacement. Sorry–my eyebrows are up.

There are also several instances of prosecutors rebuked and fired for not aggressively pursuing “voter fraud” cases, cases that these prosecutors investigated and found no cause for indictment.

We are talking about the impartial, equal application of justice, here. We are talking about officers of the court being pursuaded to take or drop cases based on the defendant’s party affiliation. We are talking about prosecutors being fired because they would not be complicit in fraud, harrassment, or corruption.

We are talking about the pervesion of our democracy at its most basic level, and yeah, you’d better believe my eyebrows are raised. We’re talking about the kind of crap the mafia is known for, not the Department of Justice! I’m appalled that we’re even discussing why this is an issue.

Regardless of what precisely the “crime” is (it will likely vary in each individual case–Gonzales and aides are in trouble for lying to Congress), the pattern is frightening. If the US attorneys are telling the truth, if the evidence holds up, this is crossing-the-beams BAD, people: it’s a non-recoverable, “shut it down now” error in our democratic process.

If we can’t trust the justice system to handle cases on the merits of the evidence instead of the party membership of the defendent, who do we turn to for help? If we can’t rely on the executive branch to imparitally enforce the laws, why bother making laws anyway?

This is a huge step backwards to robber barons, party bosses, and kangaroo courts.

And people are asking why it’s a big deal?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 at 11:17 am and is filed under Crimes Against Sanity, We The Sheeple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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