A longtime prosecutor who drew rave reviews from his supervisors was passed over for an important counterterrorism slot because his wife was active in Democratic politics, and a much-less-experienced lawyer with Republican leanings got the job, the report said.Another prosecutor was rejected for a job in part because she was thought to be a lesbian. And a Republican lawyer received high marks at his job interview because he was found to be sufficiently conservative on the core issues of "god, guns + gays."
This is outrageous, but in an administration that put a politically-connected nitwit like Michael Brown in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, hardly surprising. One reason I am a conservative and a Republican is because that's the side that argues against the proposition that jobs and placements should be apportioned on the basis of skin color, gender and other factors that have nothing to do with one's ability to do the job. I believe in fairness and a reasonable meritocracy. I believe in quality and competence above all. Then along comes something like this and makes a mockery of what Republicans and conservatives profess.
The damage this administration has done to conservative ideals and credibility will take a long time to overcome.
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Big deal. How enormous is the federal government? That is probably the first problem - too many people have to be appointed, hired, whatever, in an administration and the oversight to make sure everyone is always going to do the right thing is plain impossible. So the investigators found a few people who admitted they made hiring decision based on politics. Does Rod think that nothing of the sort ever happened during the Reagan Administration? Can Rod name a "conservative, Republican Administration" where this never occured? My suggestion for the popular media: go ahead and write your last, withering criticisms of the Bush Administration, pile on, so to speak, to use a football metaphor...its what they have been doing anyway...get it out of your system, because Bush is rapidly becoming irrelevant, and as much joy the press gets from trashing the administration, it is getting rather old. He is not running for president, Barack Obama and John McCain are.
The people who are saying that this is done in all adminstrations are confusing cynicism with wisdom. There has long been a divide between the political people and the career people in any law enforcement department, state or federal (and I've briefly been part of the political people at the state level). The DOJ has had a long and proud tradition of hiring the best people to work in its departments, regardless of their political ties, particularly in antiterrorist or other serious criminal law enforcement endeavors. Rod is right, the Monica Goodlings of the world cast a dark shadow on conservatism, one which need not have been cast (there is no reason for a conservative government to to not hire competent liberals to hunt criminals.
One wonders how many good candidates in necessary places like the antiterrorism section were turned away, or didn't bother to even send in an application once it was known what was happening in the Bush DOJ. And as implied above, this has not been standard operating procedure through the ages. No one has shown that Clinton-era applicants were asked to answer liberal versions of the God-Gays-and Guns questions during the Clinton Administration.
O c'mon!
BOTH sides do that stuff, one's as bad as the other.
I smell the same sort of corrosive and disingenuous "anti-elitism" that has marked the least palatable wing of the republican party in recent years.
The "every government does this sort of thing", "this will balance out the liberal bureaucracy", and "this will bring the bastards under control" arguments all point to a lack of respect and perceived need for efficient technocrats.
Let us not forget that "the people" and "the voters" do not have the knowledge or skills to run the large and complex federal bureaucracy. Democracy has no place when it comes to staffing the rank-and-file of the system. And surely, simplistic partisan politics bears no relation to the expert economic, legal, security, scientific or whatever work that must be done. In fact, I would guess that highly ideological people (right or left) are less likely to be sufficiently expert, compared to people who approach their fields objectively.
Anyway, what government must do is to empower technocrats, isolate them from day-to-day politics, and let them work. When politics decides to mess with them, they will rightly protect their turf from political encroachment - you thus get leaks coming out of CIA or State or whatever.
The technocratic backbone of our government is something you only notice when its gone. With the Bushies - their disdain for experts, elites, or anyone not as ideological as themselves has led to the deterioration of this backbone, and look where that got us.
"but I assumed that ALL administrations did this with their appointive posts."
There are two kinds of jobs at DOJ (and every other federal agency). Political positions and civil service positions. Obviously, you can appoint whoever you want to political positions. But civil service jobs, the rank-and-file attorneys and ALJs--are civil servants who are not supposed to have political tests applied to their work. The current scandal involves screening of entry-level attorneys who a civil servants. There is also a dispute over the appointment of immigration judges, who are also non-political civil servants.
Previously, there was a scandal over the firing of U.S. Attorneys who are political appointees and therefore serve at the pleasure of the Attorney General and the President. The controversy arose because there had always been an unspoken code that you didn't fire U.S. Attorneys for political motives and that the chief law enforcement people in the administration shouldn't be subject to the Machiavellian maneuvers of politicians.
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