1 Boring Old Man

Report Sees Illegal Hiring Practices at Justice Department

Justice Department officials over the last six years illegally used “political or ideological” factors to hire new lawyers into an elite recruitment program, tapping law school graduates with conservative credentials over those with liberal-sounding resumes, a new report found Tuesday.

The blistering report, prepared by the Justice Department’s inspector general, is the first in what will be a series of investigations growing out of last year’s scandal over the firings of nine United States attorneys. It appeared to confirm for the first time in an official examination many of the allegations from critics who charged that the Justice Department had become overly politicized during the Bush administration.

“Many qualified candidates” were rejected for the department’s honors program because of what was perceived as a liberal bias, the report found. Those practices, the report concluded, “constituted misconduct and also violated the department’s policies and civil service law that prohibit discrimination in hiring based on political or ideological affiliations.”

The shift began in 2002, when advisers to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft restructured the honors program in response to what some officials saw as a liberal tilt in recruiting young lawyers from elite law schools like Harvard and Yale. While the recruitment was once controlled largely by career officials in each section who would review applications, political officials in the department began to assume more control, rejecting candidates with liberal or Democratic affiliations “at a significantly higher rate” than those with Republican or conservative credentials, the report said.

The shift appeared to accelerate in 2006, under then-Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, with two aides on the screening committee — Michael Elston and Esther Slater McDonald — singled out for particular criticism. The blocking of applicants with liberal credentials appeared to be a particular problem in the Justice Department’s civil rights division, which has seen an exodus of career employees in recent years as the department has pursued a more conservative agenda in deciding what types of cases to bring…

[see also emptywheel]

 

Rather than lament the fact that these almost daily revelations of the abuses of power during the last eight years don’t make much of a dent, or at least the expected dent, on opinions – it seems a wiser course to try to understand why people are so wedded to the Bush Administration [or the Reagan Administration] [or the Nixon Administration] no matter what they do. I was told by a friend I’ve known for thirty-seven years, "I’m convinced that either we will have to blow the Arabs off the face of the earth, or they’ll blow us off the face of the earth." He later said, "McCain should pick Condi Rice or Colin Powell [for Vice President]. It’ll be a slam dunk." "I predict it will be McCain 68%, Obama 32% in the popular vote." Another said, "I just don’t think America will elect a black man for president." It was obvious that these were not invitations for discussion. If anything, they were comments to deflect discussion. All of these "Reports" have no impact on these opinions.

Why is that? We often say, "I don’t understand…" as a way of saying "I don’t agree…" But that leads nowhere. I actually don’t understand, but it’s not that I don’t understand the whole thing. The part I don’t get is the fear that drives this kind of rigidity. It’s as if they give ground on any point, they will open Pandora’s Box and all hell will break loose. So they think, "So what" that Bush and Cheney lied about the prewar intelligence? "So what" if the DoJ only picked conservative law students for is honors program? "So what" if the Administration made mincemeat out of our Constitution? They are standing against the chaos, so we will stand with them no matter what.

At issue – what is the chaos? Is it the "Culture War" defined by Pat Buchannan? Is it "mongrelization" as defined by the racists? Is it the dissolution of wealth? Or the erosion of morals? Or being over-run by Islamic Hordes wielding curved swords or strapped with explosives? Or is it a more psychoanalytic kind of potential chaos? I speak here of the group psychology that holds that a group that defines itself by a shared enemy becomes a powerful, but a "killing" group. A classic example would be the Ku Klux Klan. The only requirement for membership is a hatred of others – blacks, jews, catholics. Or Hitler’s Nazis who organized around hating the jews. Shared hatred is a powerful bond in groups. It diffuses the interpersonal tension by focusing the fear and aggression outside the group. We are one, brothers in our hatred. It’s a strong rationalization for group entitlement – the "rightness" of the group resolve. It feeds the individual narcissistic needs of the individual members – this sense of superiority through "rightness."

I kind of think it’s this latter force that makes the slavish adherence to the Bush Administration in spite of its incompetence and deceitfullness make sense. The major evidence is that we Liberals feel the same way. We are a more eclectic group. Liberal is, by definition, more pluralistic. But if you’re like me, you have a shared sense of conviction, and a feeling that we need to "stick together" too. We’ll overlook "our guy’s" gaffes just like "they" do.