“Loyal Bushies” and the Politicization of Justice

The phrase “No justice, no peace” once struck me as a hackneyed hippy protest chant. Today, with multiple wars raging abroad and scandal after scandal at home, it’s seems more like the official slogan of the White House.

The Bush administration has been nailed to the wall for another despicable act of dirty politics – in this case, the politicization of the Justice Department. Predictably, rather than confessing to their misdeeds, the Bush administration has fallen back into their habitual routine of denying, lying, and claiming they cannot say more for “national security” reasons.

A little background:

If you recall, while the smoke still drifted up from Ground Zero in the weeks after 9/11, the US Congress hastily passed the Orwellianly-titled the USA PATRIOT ACT. It turns out that buried within this 342-page behemoth piece of virtually unvetted (and, for that matter, unread) legislation was a provision granting the U.S. Attorney General the power to quietly fire and replace federal attorneys WITHOUT the usual process of Senate confirmation.* How this special new power could be used to “protect the Homeland” as is the purported goal of the PATRIOT Act is not entirely clear. What is clear, however, is how it could be used to “cleanse” the Justice Department of “dissidents.”

Despicably, it appears that that is precisely what White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other within the Administration sought to do. At least 8 federal prosecutors were suddenly removed from their posts despite having receiving positive performance reviews from their Justice Department peers. Their common failing it seems was not acting the part of ” loyal Bushies .” (That endearing epithet is actual language from an email exchange between White Counsel David Leitch – acting as a liason for Rove – and Gonzales’s chief of staff Kyle Sampson). In a nutshell, these diligent public servants lost their jobs for either failing to adequately harass and prosecute Democrats they felt had committed no crime or too aggressively prosecuting Republicans which they felt had.

Am I alone in finding this purge utterly despicable? This is the JUSTICE Department we are talking about for goodness sake! Justice! Call me naïve, but I have always believed that justice was about deciding what is right and wrong regardless of people’s race, gender, class, sexual orientation, or political affiliation. Not in Bush’s America apparently.

President Bush continues to refuse to have his people testify under oath. It now appears that it will take a congressional subpoena to pry out the full truth. Meanwhile, as released emails and documents cast serious doubt on Attorney General Gonzales’s claim of ignorance and noninvolvement, the calls continue to grow from both sides of the political aisle.

The politicization of our country’s halls of justice is simply unacceptable. I strongly encourage members of Congress, the media, and citizens everywhere to keep pressing for the truth in this matter until true justice is finally served.

* To their credit, the Senate passed a bill (by a 94-2 margin) to repeal this provision of the PATRIOT Act. Hopefully, the House will soon do the same and Bush will have the decency to give his official stamp.