Say Anything Blog

Here’s a bit of a larger Washington Post column about the US attorney-firings “scandal” that describes some of the replacement attorneys the Bush administration has appointed.

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.

A few months after he arrived, that lawyer was given a cash award by the department, after he was the only member of a four-person team in the civil rights division who sided with a Georgia voter-identification law that was later struck down by the courts as discriminatory to minorities, according to two former Justice lawyers.

Another honors hire, a graduate of the University of Kentucky College of Law who had been president of the campus chapter of the Federalist Society, displayed a bust of President James Madison in his Justice office, according to a former honors program lawyer who was hired during the Clinton administration. A profile of Madison’s face is the logo of the society, which is based on conservative precepts.

That the authors of this article seem to expect us to be shocked at the idea of a former clerk for Judge Pickering, and someone who was a member of the Federalist Society and has a bust of James Madison in his office, speaks volumes about their biases.  Sure the Democrats found Pickering an objectionable appointee, but they’re hardly an objective source.  And what’s so bad about the Federalist Society?  Or James flipppin’ Madison, the author the Constitution, for that matter?

Further, why should these ideological indicators even matter? I thought the whole point of this dumb scandal was that the Bush administration was firing people because of their politics, now we have to listen to Democrat critics and liberal journalists whine about the ideologies of their replacements?  Talk about hypocritical.  If it doesn’t matter if a US attorney is a liberal, it shouldn’t matter if he/she is a conservative either.

Which strikes to the very heart of this faux controversy.  It isn’t so much about the Bush administration considering politics when appointing/firing US attorneys (a process that has always been political in nature) but rather a bunch of screamin’ liberals and their mouthpieces in the media objecting to conservatives getting these jobs.