Fight fire with firings!

The right wing has asked a simple question: Did the Administration break any laws by firing U.S. Attorneys, and if not, what’s the big deal? These are two excellent questions that absolutely deserve answers.

Did the Administration break the law by firing officials that work at the pleasure of the President? (Hey, didn’t Monica Lewinski have that same job description?)

No, the president has the right to fire them at his leisure.

Then what’s the big deal? As the GOP points out regularly, President Clinton fired U.S. Attorneys.

Here is the problem. It starts with the fact that up until the “Patriot Act,” all U.S. Attorneys had to be confirmed by the Senate. This rule kept most of the presidents of both parties honest in who they would appoint. The Patriot Act changed this by allowing the President to appoint temporary U.S. Attorneys, but there was no time limit on how long temporary is.

Congress, thankfully, has fixed this loophole.

But the important thing for this scandal is tracing what was going on in the rest of the country while this purging of non-loyalists was going on. We, as a nation, were up to our armpits in GOP scandals. We had Bob Ney and Duke Cunningham out there fighting investigations. We also had, apparently, some senior Republican officeholders calling U.S. Attorneys to check up on investigations of public officials.

Then, all of the sudden: “poof”. Firings

The big deal, which the likes of Glen Beck can’t wrap their tiny little minds around, is that it looks as if the Department of Justice decided to purge prosecutors to curtail investigations of Republicans and to spur on investigations of Democrats.

The big deal is that there is an appearance that the Department of Justice became just another piece of the political landscape, rather than being an impartial law enforcement agency.

The appearance of impropriety is only made worse by the involvement of Karl Rove, who should not have had his mitts on the Justice Department in the first place, and should not have maneuvered his deputy into one of the newly opened positions.

The appearance of impropriety is made much worse by the fact that the President won’t let anybody clear up the appearance of impropriety. It makes everybody in the Democratic Party suspicious when the GOP resists testifying under oath.

In the end, the problem is that it looks like Bush used the DOJ to carry out a political vendetta, and that when a few U.S. Attorneys resisted, they were replaced without confirmation hearings.

The president needs to either show that we are drawing incorrect conclusions by letting Rove and Miers testify under oath, or heads need to role.