U.S. Attorneygate has reached a new--and hilarious--low. Now they are concerned that--gasp!--political appointees vetted prospective attorneys and recommended hiring lawyers who might forward conservative goals.
At what point did it become illegal to actually argue for conservative ideals? If Bill Clinton's Justice Department hired political appointees who recommended attorneys who forwarded Clinton's goals, this would have been a non-issue. But George Bush's Justice Department does the same thing--what conservatives expect it to do--and this is the scandal?
The Washington Post unveils this mindbending discovery in this article. Obviously, "career lawyers" were concerned their buddies weren't getting the top picks. What, exactly, was wrong about the new hires?
Complaints about the program emerged again this month after Senate and House investigators received a letter from the unidentified Justice employees, who alleged that hiring at the department was "consistently and methodically being eroded by partisan politics." The letter singled out the honors and intern programs, alleging that senior political appointees appeared to reject applicants who "had interned for a Hill Democrat, clerked for a Democratic judge, worked for a 'liberal' cause, or otherwise appeared to have 'liberal' leanings."
Yes, I suppose if you are a Democrat, you assume you get all the positions in a Republican administration. After all, that's the argument Democrats made when Republicans were in control of the Senate. It is unsurprising, therefore, that Democrats would think a conservative administration is duty-bound to hire liberal lawyers. Are these people really that dumb?
Worse, according to the career attorneys,
According to a former deputy chief in the civil rights division, one honors hire was a University of Mississippi law school graduate who had been a clerk for U.S. District Judge Charles W. Pickering Sr. about the time the judge's nomination by President Bush to a federal appeals court provoked opposition by congressional Democrats, who contended that Pickering was hostile to civil rights.
So, now the fact that someone clerked with a judge that Democrats "contended" was hostile to civil rights is enough to disqualify that person? Would the same be said if the person had clerked for Stephen Reinhardt?
The career lawyers also complained that many hires had "strong conservative or Republican ties." I'm shocked! Shocked! That Republicans would hire Republicans!
Todd Zywicki at The Volokh Conspiracy pointed out how lame this argumentation is. (Emphasis mine)
Gracious, a civil rights lawyer who clerked for Charles Pickering--who "congressional Democrats ... contended" was hostile to civil rights (apparently since some congressional Democrats "contended it," all of his clerks are disqualified from working in the office).
The other example cited in the article seems odd as well--why is it supposed to be a problem that a graduate of Regent Law School might be interested in working on "some religious liberties" cases. Would we be similarly shocked if a minority graduate of Southern Law School, for example, expressed a particular interest in working on Voting Rights cases, or a former intern at a pro-choice organization was interested in reproductive rights cases?
The unintentional irony of this is that these examples are provided as examples of the "nonideological" bona fides of the career lawyers who offered them as examples. The career lawyer who is cited (as well as the authors of the article) seems confident that any right-minded person would shocked and outraged that a lawyer was a member of the Federalist Society and had a bust of James Madison in his office or that one of Judge Pickering's clerks worked in the civil rights division.
This is not to say one way or the other whether the new policy is a good one. Or that there may be real examples that actually prove the reporters' point. Or that there were improper ideological pressures in this case that were fundamentally different from Democratic administrations, or that political favoritism is somehow different or more pernicious than all of the other sorts of preferences and favoritism that also play into hiring processes. I don't know the answer to these questions, but it seems obvious that merit alone has never the sole criterion for securing these positions, and that a variety of other personal, geographic, and demographic factors have always played into these decisions.
But if these are the "smoking gun" examples that are the best ones that career attorneys can offer as conservative ideology run amuck at the DOJ, then it seems to me that this says more about the real biases of the supposedly "nonpolitical" attitudes of DOJs career attorneys and the ideological parochialism of the Washington Post than about some sort of hiring "scandal" at DOJ. If these are the sorts of trivialities that career DOJ attorneys consider to be evidence of an extreme ideological shift to the right at the DOJ, then forgive me for being skeptical that the end result of giving career lawyers a monopoly on hiring for these positions is going to eliminate ideology from the hiring process.
Moreover, it is naive to think that putting these career lawyers in charge of hiring will certainly not remove ideology from the hiring process (not to mention the thinly-veiled elite snobbery in the otherwise-irrelevant references to University of Mississippi and University of Kentucky Law Schools in the article). It seems evident that a Federalist Society member or Pickering clerk would have those credentials held against him or her by at least this particular career lawyer. If so, is that different from the concern expressed by congressional investigators that senior political appointees appeared to reject applicants who "had interned for a Hill Democrat, clerked for a Democratic judge, worked for a 'liberal' cause, or otherwise appeared to have 'liberal' leanings?"
Yes, the problem with the examples given is that there is nothing wrong with clerking with Charles Pickering or graduating from the University of Mississippi Law School. What is wrong is the narrow-minded snobbery evidenced by "career lawyers" who think lawyers from any school but Harvard and Yale are inferior. But I wonder if these same career lawyers condemned the nomination of Samuel Alito (Yale class of '75) and Clarence Thomas (Yale class of '74).
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