David Brooks has a pretty good piece on the USA firing issue in today’s NYT: A Proper Distinction

the word “political” in this context has two meanings, one philosophic, one partisan. The prosecutors are properly political when their choices are influenced by the policy priorities of elected officeholders. If the president thinks prosecutors should spend more time going after terrorists, prosecutors should follow his lead.

But prosecutors are improperly political if they bow to pressure to protect members of the president’s party or team.

Indeed. The word “political” has multiple meanings. My masthead says “Politics is the Master Science”–which is a derivation of the quote above the logo from Aristotle’s Ethics. The reference there is to the study of human interaction and the degree to which those inactions can lead to either the happiness or unhappiness of human beings and further how those interactions permeate practically everything that we do. As such, something can be about politics in a very broad sense.

Further, one could refer to something as “political” in a neutral sense as being something that pertains to government or governing. Sometimes the term politics gets mixed in with the idea of public policy–which simply refers to the actions of government.

Politics (or “political” actions) can also have a negative connotation when used to describe the machinations of a given actor to further the goals of a specific person, party or group. In such a case “political” acts are often executed via an exercise of raw power and are done in a way that sometimes may be questionable ethically, even if the action is legal. Often the degree to which this usage of the term is to be viewed in a negative light often relates to which person or party is engaging in the action (and which “side” one finds oneself on).

Of course, the usages of the term “politics” or “political” can overlap.

Along those lines, Brooks continues:

The problem is that there is a gray area between these two political roles. People of good faith disagree about whether the Clinton administration behaved improperly in firing almost all of the 93 prosecutors it inherited, in the midst of some high-profile and politically troublesome cases.

Prosecutors, like other professionals, develop a code of honor to help them steer through the gray areas. This code of honor consists of a series of habits and understandings to help individual prosecutors know how to behave when loyalty to the law is in tension with loyalty to the president.

And one of the problems here as been that at least some people in the AG’s office and in the White House seem to be focused too heavily on the latter.

Brooks notes that at a minimum, it would appear that the DoJ is not very well run:

But what’s striking in reading through the Justice Department e-mail messages is that senior people in that agency seem never to have thought about the proper role of politics in their decision-making. They reacted like chickens with their heads cut off when this scandal broke because they could not articulate the differences between a proper political firing and an improper one.

Moreover, they had no coherent sense of honor. Alberto Gonzales apparently never communicated a code of conduct to guide them as they wrestled with various political pressures. That’s a grievous failure of leadership.

Agreed.

And it is difficult to argue with this:

the White House, instead of trying to restore some proportion, has picked a fight over a transcript. The president says he will allow White House staff to appear before Congress, but not in public, not under oath and not with a transcript. The president apparently expects his supporters to rally behind the sacred cause of No Transcript. In time of war, he’s decided to expend political capital so that his staffers can lie to Congress without legal consequences.

This is a position only a lawyer can love. From compassionate conservatism, we’ve descended to pedantic or legalistic conservatism.

Indeed.

Fun, isn’t it?

And I must confess: as each day goes by I am more amazed that anyone wants to defend the administration on this issue. While the jury is still out on the severity of this scandal, the bottom line is that it is impossible to say that this has been handled well by anyone in the administration. (And before someone claims there is no scandal here, I would note a few incontrovertible issues: 1) DoJ representatives have clearly provided incorrect information to Congress, whether it was purposeful or not remains to be seen; 2) the public has been lied to: the original spin was that these people were fired for poor performance, but it is clear that many were fired with high performance ratings; 3) the public statements about performance has unnecessarily tainted the careers of a number of people (..and for what?); and 4) there are a lot of coincidences regarding fired USAs and political investigations that have not been adequately explained).

(And see, the NYT’s move has paid off-my first blogging of an NYT opinion piece in some time…).

h/t: Althouse.

Technorati Tags: USAs, Fired USAs, Fired Attorneys, DoJ, Alberto Gonzalez, David Brooks

8 Comments

1. How about defending the administration this way.

   Sometimes unfair things happen in the world. Some of these firings may seem unfair or even be unfair but is that really worth the indignation being shown?

   Given that they serve at the pleasure of the POTUS even if it was politically motivated does it rise to a level of constitutional crisis or scandal?

   Would a USA’s career really be tainted over this after all of the publicity and the acknowledgement that these do involve politics?

   To me (and many others) this is making a mountain out of a molehill. The country has bigger problems and issues that need attention. Washington is a hard knock place and those who choose to play in that particular game know the rules and know what can happen.

   My position is not unreasonable or out of the mainstream. Many of us see this as more of an attempt by a Dem congress to embarass the administration in whatever way it can. The press is also looking for something juicy to throw the viewers so the story is hanging around like a bad penny.

   Comment by Steven Plunk — Thursday, March 22, 2024 @ 12:30 pm

2. I never asserted it was a constitutional crisis.

   Your defense, while true in a general sense, really doesn’t answer any of the questions that exist in regards to this situation and its handling. We don’t have easy, clear firings here, we have messing, incompetent actions that are suspicious and that have been dealt with via a series of ever-changing explanations.

   Yes, the country has bigger problems, but some of those bigger problems has come about because of incompetence within this administration (serious, gross incompetence) and so it behooves us to take more evidence of incompetence seriously lest more problems be birthed. Some of those problems have also derived from this administration attempting to acquire more power than it ought to have. Again, this situation smacks both of a power grab and incompetent actions on the part of the admin. As such, I think it is very important.

   And, for the sake of being provocative, I would note that I am not a Democratic member of Congress (nor is Brooks), nor part of the mainstream media, yet I find the situation problematic. Ed Morrissey likewise. Even Patterico, who has attempted to defend the administration, has called for Gonzalez’s firing.

   Comment by Dr. Steven Taylor — Thursday, March 22, 2024 @ 12:43 pm

3. I didn’t mean to imply you had asserted or characterized this as a constitutional crisis. But others have said this could lead to such a crisis as executive and congressional branches battle.

   Sure it’s been messy and not handled well but that’s not scandalous behavior. These are humans making simple mistakes in human relations. I say again, not that big of a deal.

   I would expect the errors in handling this have more to do with unanticipated uproar than with anything being hidden. It was a perfectly legal thing to do that should not have generated this much of a to do.

   As for a power grab I think we both agree the firings are not unusual and they are legal. How is exercising a predetermined executive branch power a power grab?

   It seems that minor mistakes lead to calls for firings. I don’t see any of this as scandalous or worth a mention in a personel file. If the good Captain (who I really like to read) and Patterico think it’s a problem then I disagree with them. But like any real thinker I can come to a different conclusion than those I admire. Which would include you, by the way.

   There are, as you say, some unanswered questions about the firings but I just don’t see the answers as very important. We can’t know everything about everything all the time.

   Comment by Steven Plunk — Thursday, March 22, 2024 @ 3:12 pm

4. One is more than entitled to one’s own opinion, to be sure.

   I think that making unprecedented moves to shore up the political base of a group of actors who should be somewhat insulated from politics by using a new and largely unnoticed power in a way that at least had the appearance of influencing political investigations (or punishing individuals for not pursuing certain issues) is scandalous. If one doesn’t like that word, then I would say that it is an issue worthy of attention–which is really all that I have argued for.

   My main frustration in all of this is the assertion that this is all business as usual, when it isn’t.

   a) it involved a new statutory power from the renewal of the Patriot Act.

   and

   b) there have never been this many mid-term firings of USAs before, let alone in the second term of a presidency.

   and

   c) Almost all of the past mid-term firings were for malfeasance.

   Whatever this is, it isn’t just like the past, as none of this has happened in the past–which, by itself, makes it noteworthy.

   Further, there has been a pattern within this administration and DoJ specifically that demonstrates a desire to work sans oversight. Again, this move with the USAs is very much about avoiding oversight–yet another reason to consider it significant.

   And yes, human beings make mistakes–but their are mistakes and their is incompetence. I see incompetence here, which is not something I want in the federal government or the DoJ specifically.

   Comment by Dr. Steven Taylor — Thursday, March 22, 2024 @ 3:25 pm

5. I admit that I am not a lawyer and am not completely knowledgeable about what the law literally says; but I have been since the beginning of this scandal under the impression that these attorneys, being members of the president’s appointed staff, work at his pleasure.

   I have held public jobs before where I worked at the pleasure of a politician and know first hand that, generally, people in that sort of position can be fired for any reason, or even for no reason. It came close to happening to me once; I smelled the stink and resigned before it happened, but am pretty sure it would have, and there would have been no recourse for me. It would have been a completely political move by a new city administration that wanted to get rid of the old people and install some new people.

   The administration may have handled the explanation about why these people were fired badly - but if they are presidential appointees, who don’t need to be approved by congress, why does the administration owe a reason to congress or to anyone else in the first place? Did the administration break the law by firing these people? Even if the firings were politically motivated, what does the law say about that? Does it make an exception to the president’s authority to hire or dispose of people for that purpose? Is it specifically laid out? I’m not commenting on the rightness or wrongness of political firings; I’m just positing the question of whether or not it is legal to do so, by the letter of the law.

   I wouldn’t submit that the administration does not like to work without oversight. Clearly it does. And yet, there are times and circumstances where, from history and the law, the executive branch is clearly supposed to work without oversight. Just because we see a pattern of gray-area violations by a particular president doesn’t mean that everything he does should be treated that way; when something is firmly within the realm of the executive branch, we should leave it there, pattern of violations or not.

   This controversy would not exist at all if congress had not created it. It seems to me that if hiring and firing staff is a presidential privilege, unless we change the law and add an oversight responsibility, whether we like it or not, and whether it’s fair or not, firing these people was a legal action.

   That said, what was Congress raking the muck for? Is this really about these attorneys or is something else driving this? Were they looking for explanations (they don’t need) in the hope of catching the administration in a lie or mistruth? If so, it worked, and we were all a party to that entrapment.

   Personally I think the whole thing stinks, and I smell stink in both the executive and legislative branches. Shame on the executive branch for handling this badly. Shame on the legislative for the same thing - it’s an equally bold lie to tell the american people that they are trying to do something noble and just by looking out for the interests of these poor fired attorneys who were fired for political reasons, when their inquisition is, at least to me, also clearly politically motivated.

   I hope the courts are able to hose them both down because the stench is getting unbearable. If they can’t. . . yeesh. I guess I’ll just have to learn to hold my breath longer because all three branches will be reeking pretty badly.

   PS - someone call me on it if I’m wrong about the “employed at will” concept. Admittedly I am not an expert.

   Comment by Robert Divis — Thursday, March 22, 2024 @ 7:21 pm

6. You are correct on the basics: they serve at the pleasure of the president.

   However, as I have noted in various posts, that is a significant oversimplification of the situation.

   Just search on my site for USAs and read the posts.

   Comment by Dr. Steven Taylor — Thursday, March 22, 2024 @ 11:08 pm

7. Two Meanings of ‘Political’

   Michael Kinsley praises a David Brooks column that’s behind the NYT subscription firewall, for nailing a distinction that many have failed to make in the controversy over the administration’s firing of eight U.S. Attorneys.
   Brooks’s disti…

   Trackback by Outside The Beltway | OTB — Friday, March 23, 2024 @ 7:22 am

8. Robert Divis:

   Congress has oversight responsibilities already; there is no need to add another statutory layer to create it. First, Congress needs to know how the criminal law and the departments that it created are working, in order to fulfill its legislative responsibilities. Congress also needs to know how your tax dollars are spent. Second, and perhaps more striking, the House has the ultimate oversight responsibility over the executive: the House can vote articles of impeachment. No one can seriously maintain that firing US Attorneys could never be an impeachable offense, whether or not there is a connection to criminal offenses. Imagine that the President fired ten US Attorneys who were investigating assassination plots against his political rivals. Should Congress just sit on its hands because US Attorneys are can be fired at will? I doubt it.

   Steven Plunk:

   Assume that the allegations are true that the firings were the result of an attempt to impede corruption investigations of Republicans and to encourage politically-timed corruption and voter fraud investigations and indictments of Democrats in order to help Republicans (even if the US attorney thought the charges were actually bogus). Legal? Not necessarily in all cases, but let’s say that they were legal. Isn’t Congress entitled to investigate whether the White House is directing such a political (read: private) operation through the Justice Department, using your tax dollars, under the authority of laws that Congress itself wrote?

   Comment by Brett — Friday, March 23, 2024 @ 10:31 am

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