The deeper problem revealed by the US attorney Purge

The questions regarding whether the US attorneys have been misused for political purposes or were fired in order to prevent the further investigation of criminal wrong-doing by Republican office holders as was the case of ex-Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (CA-R) has been rather obvious. But the close scrutiny of the management and misuse of the Department of Justice under Ashcroft and Gonzales has begun to reveal even deeper problems. CBS News.com Legal Analyst and attorney Andrew Cohen presents his take on this:

the concerted effort by the White House to undermine the professional class of lawyers at the Justice Department has been rumbling like thunder for years. The immediate crisis concerning the federal prosecutors will be over soon enough. The Administration's forced brain drain at Justice threatens its stature and effectiveness for years to come.

Thanks to the spotlight's glare on how and why the Justice Department and White House conspired to fire eight loyal U.S. Attorneys last year, we now are hearing about how career professionals at Justice — nonpartisan federal lawyers who make up the backbone of the department — have been squeezed out or otherwise marginalized over the past few years by ideological (and in many cases underachieving and intellectually weak) attorneys chosen more for their partisan views and political connections than for their ability to offer unbiased and sharp stewardship over the nation's federal laws. [Snip]

Regent University School of Law, [is] a Christian institution founded by televangelist Pat Robertson which is ranked by U.S. News and World Report as the 136th-best law school in the nation (other rankings are only slightly more kind). Savage reports that Regent became a feeder school for executive branch positions after the Bush administration in 2001 "picked the dean of Regent's government school, Kay Coles James, to be the director of the Office of Personnel Management — essentially the head of human resources for the executive branch."

One year later, Savage reports, in 2002, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft — who led prayer meetings at the Justice Department, remember — changed the hiring rules at the Department to make it easier for ideological candidates (and for candidates with unimpressive academic credentials) to be selected to serve as career lawyers. Our government, our Justice Department, no longer seeks only the best and the brightest from our nation's law schools. Instead, it allows itself to be overrun with fourth-rate lawyers (Regent was ranked in the fourth tier of law schools) whose political views and loyalties are convenient and useful to implementing the administration's policies. [Fourth-rate. Rather like our illustrious President himself, who couldn't even get into law school. Editor.]

"This Administration's decision to forego traditional selection processes that have been used by both Republican and Democratic administrations is a reflection of the White House's determination to politicize, to change, an agency where lawyers of all political stripes have served in a non-partisan way for years," former deputy attorney general Eric Holder, Jr. told me via e-mail on Monday. Another former Clinton official at Justice, Jamie Gorelick, offered this via e-mail: "To politicize the selection of this corps of professionals, to ignore their advice, to make decisions without bringing to bear their experience and values is to risk undermining the rule of law." Legal historians agree and so do other Washington insiders, including Republicans, all of whom hearken for a return of the professionals to the Justice Department.

So with personnel like these we get totally bogus cases brought for political purposes such as the one in which Georgia Thompson of Wisconsin was convicted without a shred of evidence that a crime had been committed. We get ethical US attorneys like Iglesias of New Mexico who are removed from office because they refused to prostitute the justice system to elect more Republicans and find them replaced by individuals like Rachel Paulose who have no managerial experience and little in the way of legal experience, but are full of Party zeal and ideology.

The White House and Justice Department, under the reign of attorneys general Ashcroft and Gonzales, have encouraged over the past half decade an atmosphere that sullies the coin of the realm under our rule of law — the perceived legitimacy and authority and objectivity and neutrality and professional competence of the men and women who are tasked with enforcing our laws uniformly, fairly and without fear or favor. Without that legitimacy, the legal system devolves down into Third World status, perceived by those within and without it as subject to manipulation for political purposes.

When you populate an office with ideologues and partisans and underachieving talent, you get an ideological and partisan office with underachieving results. ... This sorry state is true today, regardless of how and when the scandal over the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys is resolved. Of all the dismaying legal legacies left by this administration, this one surely ranks near the top.

I learned in graduate school that in the USSR promotions came from ideological zeal and political effort rather than competence. It has long been my opinion that this emphasis of ideology and politics over reality and effectiveness was a major reason that authoritarian government was a necessity there, since without such authoritarian measures the existing top leaders would be removed by the people who demanded an effective government. Gorbachev attempted to reform the Communist Party and redirect the USSR so that effectiveness and reality were more important than politics and ideology for promotion. The first result of Gorbachev's attempted reform was that the Communist Party, along with Gorbachev himself, was removed from control of the USSR.

The Bush administration and the Republican party wish to bring to America all the "joys and blessings" of ideological rule. They will not be able to do that without applying authoritarian methods, such as eliminating habeas corpus and the Rule of Law. That is what is so scary about the Jose Padilla case. The Bushies have done exactly that.

The Bushies are well on the way towards a right-wing theocratic authoritarian state here. To accomplish that, they first have to gut the Department of Justice. US attorney Biscup, Rachal Paulose and Monica Goodling demonstrate that they are well on the way to accomplishing exactly that.