Lynch at Large

Don't get me wrong. Any friend of Carl Rove is....

Well, I do have some self-imposed prohibitions against profanity and expressions that are too disgusting even for a self-promoting blog. Let us not cut Republicans any slack under any circumstances. Of course, in Christian charity, we should pray for them.

We should also keep up on the other side's arguments and keep a watchful eye for any inconvenient facts, which might be hurtling towards earth like an errant asteroid.

The following was passed to me in a back ally behind a dumpster overflowing with spent gin bottles, not far from a den of cackling right-wing fat-cat oppressors. I took the document and ran for dear life.

This ran in National Review. I might bring this up to Mark Pryor this morning when he is on my show at 10:30 (see thread below).

January 17, 2007, 1:30 p.m.

The Pot Calling the Kettle “Interim”
Democrats with short memories rail about Bush’s removal of U.S. attorneys.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

In lambasting the Bush administration for politicizing the appointment of the nation’s United States attorneys, Democrats may be on the verge of redefining chutzpah.

The campaign is being spearheaded on the Judiciary Committee by Senator Dianne Feinstein. She contends that at least seven U.S. attorneys — tellingly, including those for two districts in her home state — have been “forced to resign without cause.” They are, she further alleges, to be replaced by Bush appointees who will be able to avoid Senate confirmation thanks to a “little known provision” of the Patriot Act reauthorization law enacted in 2006.

Going into overdrive, Feinstein railed on the Senate floor Tuesday that “[t]he public response has been shock. Peter Nunez, who served as the San Diego U.S. Attorney from 1982 to 1988 has said, ‘This is like nothing I’ve ever seen in my 35-plus years.’”

Yes, the public, surely, is about as “shocked, shocked” as Claude Raines’s Captain Renault, and one is left to wonder whether Mr. Nunez spent the 1990s living under a rock.

One of President Clinton’s very first official acts upon taking office in 1993 was to fire every United States attorney then serving — except one, Michael Chertoff, now Homeland Security secretary but then U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, who was kept on only because a powerful New Jersey Democrat, Sen. Bill Bradley, specifically requested his retention.

Were the attorneys Clinton fired guilty of misconduct or incompetence? No. As a class they were able (and, it goes without saying, well-connected). Did he shove them aside to thwart corruption investigations into his own party? No. It was just politics, plain and simple.

Patronage is the chief spoil of electoral war. For a dozen years, Republicans had been in control of the White House, and, therefore of the appointment of all U.S. attorneys. President Clinton, as was his right, wanted his party’s own people in. So he got rid of the Republican appointees and replaced them with, predominantly, Democrat appointees (or Republicans and Independents who were acceptable to Democrats).

We like to think that law enforcement is not political, and for the most part — the day-to-day part, the proceedings in hundreds of courtrooms throughout the country — that is true. But appointments are, and have always been political. Does it mean able people are relieved before their terms are up? Yes, but that is the way the game is played.

Indeed, a moment’s reflection on the terms served by U.S. attorneys reveals the emptiness of Feinstein’s argument. These officials are appointed for four years, with the understanding that they serve at the pleasure of the president, who can remove them for any reason or no reason. George W. Bush, of course, has been president for six years. That means every presently serving U.S. attorney in this country has been appointed or reappointed by this president.

That is, contrary to Clinton, who unceremoniously cashiered virtually all Reagan and Bush 41 appointees, the current President Bush can only, at this point, be firing his own appointees. Several of them, perhaps even all of them, are no doubt highly competent. But it is a lot less unsavory, at least at first blush, for a president to be rethinking his own choices than to be muscling out another administration’s choices in an act of unvarnished partisanship.

Feinstein’s other complaint, namely, that the Bush administration is end-running the Constitution’s appointment process, which requires Senate confirmation for officers of the United States (including U.S. attorneys), is also unpersuasive.

As she correctly points out, the Patriot Act reauthorization did change prior law. Previously, under the federal code (Title 28, Section 546), if the position of district U.S. attorney became vacant, it could be filled for up to 120 days by an interim appointee selected by the attorney general. What would happen at the end of that 120-day period, if a new appointee (who would likely also be the interim appointee) had not yet been appointed by the president and confirmed by the senate? The old law said the power to appoint an interim U.S. attorney would then shift to the federal district court, whose appointee would serve until the president finally got his own nominee confirmed.

This was a bizarre arrangement. Law enforcement is exclusively an executive branch power. The Constitution gives the judiciary no role in executive appointments, and the congressional input is limited to senate confirmation. U.S. attorneys are important members of the Justice Department — the top federal law enforcement officers in their districts. But while the attorney general runs the Justice Department, U.S. attorneys work not for the AG but for the president. They are delegated to exercise executive authority the Constitution reposes only in the president, and can thus be terminated at will by the president. Consequently, having the courts make interim appointments made no practical sense, in addition to being constitutionally dubious.

The Patriot Act reauthorization remedied this anomaly by eliminating both the role of the district courts and the 120-day limit on the attorney general’s interim appointments. The interim appointee can now serve until the senate finally confirms the president’s nominee.

Is there potential for abuse here? Of course — there’s no conceivable appointments structure that would not have potential for abuse. Like it or not, in our system, voters are the ultimate check on political excess.

So yes, a president who wanted to bypass the Constitution’s appointments process could fire the U.S. attorney, have the attorney general name an interim appointee, and simply refrain from submitting a nominee to the senate for confirmation. But we’ve also seen plenty of abuse from the Senate side of appointments — and such abuse was not unknown under the old law. Though the president can nominate very able U.S. attorney candidates — just as this president has also nominated very able judicial candidates — those appointments are often stalled in the confirmation process by the senate’s refusal to act, its imperious blue-slip privileges (basically, a veto for senators from the home state of the nominee), and its filibusters.

But that’s politics. The president tries to shame the senate into taking action on qualified nominees. Senator Feinstein, now, is trying to shame the White House — making sure the pressure is on the administration not to misuse the Patriot Act modification as an end-around the confirmation process.

Why is Feinstein doing this? After all, the next president may be a Democrat and could exploit to Democratic advantage the same perks the Bush administration now enjoys.

Well, because Feinstein is not going to be the next president. She is still going to be a senator and clearly intends to remain a powerful one. Aside from being enshrined in the Constitution, the confirmations process is a significant source of senatorial power no matter who the president is. Practically speaking, confirmation is what compels a president of either party to consult senators rather than just peremptorily installing the president’s own people. Over the years, it has given senators enormous influence over the selection of judges and prosecutors in their states. Feinstein does not want to see that power diminished.

It’s worth noting, however, that the same Democrats who will be up in arms now were mum in the 1990s. President Clinton not only fired U.S. attorneys sweepingly and without cause. He also appointed high executive-branch officials, such as Justice Department civil-rights division chief Bill Lann Lee, on an “acting” basis even though their positions called for senate confirmation. This sharp maneuver enabled those officials to serve even though it had become clear that they would never be confirmed.

Reporting on Lee on February 26, 1998, the New York Times noted: “Under a Federal law known as the Vacancy Act, a person may serve in an acting capacity for 120 days. But the [Clinton] Administration has argued that another Federal law supercedes the Vacancy Act and gives the Attorney General the power to make temporary law enforcement assignments of any duration.”

What the Clinton administration dubiously claimed was the law back then is, in fact, the law right now. Yet, for some strange reason — heaven knows what it could be — Senator Feinstein has only now decided it’s a problem. Like the public, I’m shocked.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.