Justice Department lawyers [unanimously] concluded that the landmark Texas congressional redistricting plan spearheaded by Rep. Tom DeLay (R) violated the Voting Rights Act … But senior officials overruled them and approved the plan. …“The State of Texas has not met its burden in showing that the proposed congressional redistricting plan does not have a discriminatory effect,” the memo concluded.
The memo also found that Republican lawmakers and state officials who helped craft the proposal were aware it posed a high risk of being ruled discriminatory compared with other options. …
J. Gerald “Gerry” Hebert, one of the lawyers representing Texas Democrats who are challenging the redistricting in court, said of the Justice Department’s action: “We always felt that the process … wouldn’t be corrupt, but it was… The staff didn’t see this as a close call or a mixed bag or anything like that. This should have been a very clear-cut case.”
The nation has been greatly strengthened over the years by the tradition in the Department of Justice of giving great, and almost invariably decisive, weight to the recommendations of staff attorneys in specific cases, even headline ones, while leaving matters of overarching policy firmly in the hands of political appointees. That process has now been corrupted, and the political appointees are not just setting policy, but are micro-managing specific cases. The concept, hitherto foreign to Justice Department career attorneys, is that the client is not the nation, but rather the president and his political party.
The issue is not whether this case-specific, result-oriented approach to justice and government is illegal; it is not. The issue is whether a nation can long remain great, strong, and respected when it is run as Tammany Hall. The answer is that it cannot; the Tammany Hall approach — bad government conservatism — in the long run weakens the nation.
However at least some of these pros will stilll be around once Bush is gone, and while he will pardon a huge bunch of his crooked cronies, he won't be able to get all the way down the line and a few will be left to face the music. And they will turn on their own, as rats do. If the new Democratic president shows more balls than Clinton did (he never went after the crooks from the RR and GHWB administrations), maybe some of them will yet find themselves in their natural home behind bars.
Posted by: Fast Eddie on December 2, 2005 9:45 PM