Our tattered Justice Department

I've argued in the past that John Edwards should be the next Attorney General of the United States. The Bush administration has wreaked havoc with our government but their activities have been especially pernicious in the Department of Justice. Today we find out from the NY Times that there has been rampant politicization of non-political positions in the DOJ,

WASHINGTON -- 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 report notes that the procedures were begun in 2002 under John Aschcroft and accelerated in 2006 under Alberto Gonzalez. None of this is exactly a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention for the last 6 years but it's nice to have some official documentation of these abuses. The poisoning of the Department of Justice is an especially appalling transgression from an administration that seems to specialize in appalling transgressions.

A democratic nations justice system is fundamental to it's vibrancy and health as a society. Without a functioning, non-partisan, non-ideological justice system a nation will quickly cease to be truly democratic in any meaningful way. In my opinion cleaning up the Department of Justice and changing the environment within the the DOJ should be the first order of business for our next president.

In writing about these most recent revelations from the Department of Justice Inspector General Sir Charles at Cogitamus draws a provocative but accurate analogy,

I have repeatedly railed over the last seven plus years that the Bush Administration is qualitatively different from all of those that have gone before. And I don't just mean in the fact that they have proven incapable of governing competently. Rather, a related point, and one inextricably linked to the incompetence -- the fact that this is the most ideological administration in American history. one I have repeatedly described with little exaggeration, as "Leninist" in temperament.

What do I mean by calling Bush and his coterie Leninists? Obviously they are not attempting to overthrow the established order to create the dictatorship of the proletariat. But what they share in common with those who established the Soviet Union is the belief in belief , i.e. the notion that reality can literally be transformed by ideology. It is a world without objective fact and one in which nothing is sacred -- even the sacred. Everything is a means to an end, a mode of acquiring power, and power is acquired to acquire yet more power. Friends are rewarded and enemies punished, not in the name of some greater good, but in the cause of the continuation of the self-perpetuating power machine.