The Gonzales Debacle (by Rick Perlstein at TomPaine.com)

[marmar]

The Gonzales Debacle



It's hard to write about how badly conservative governance has degraded us as a nation because, well, it has so degraded us as a nation: They have managed to make us forget once-sturdy pillars of our national morality. To help heal this degradation, you have to explain very basic things—things taken for granted before the conservatives took over. You sound like a fourth-grade teacher. Or like a patronizing ass.

Please forgive me. I'm about to go there.

The notion of a disinterested civil service, of government officials chosen for their ability to do the job rather than their loyalty to political bosses, is one of the great accomplishments of the modern world. The nation's corps of 93 United States attorneys are not civil servants in the strictest sense—they're not part of a system in which merit is measured by formal examinations, nor are they protected against firing without cause. But by sound tradition, written and unwritten—the kind of sound tradition conservatives once felt themselves duty-bound by definition to respect—they have always been considered something close: political appointees serving a non-political, even anti-political, function.

"While U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president, they must not only serve to please the president," Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales during yesterday's hearings on whether Gonzales improperly fired nine of these U.S. attorneys for political reasons. In response, Gonzales agreed.

Or claimed to agree.
...(snip)...

If only Gonzales had been more polite, perhaps this conservative wouldn't be calling for his resignation. He all but said so: "I disavow, aggressively, any implication that there was a political nature in this." Nope—as Coburn put it in his prepared public relations statement for the press this morning, "This situation was handled incompetently.... The standards used to dismiss the U.S. Attorneys should be applied to the Attorney General."

But Senator Coburn is wrong. The standards used to dismiss the U.S. attorneys are already being applied to the attorney general. For their refusal to serve as George Bush's political pawns, U.S. attorneys were fired. For his willingness to serve as George Bush's political pawn, the attorney general is being retained. For some reason Coburn's been praised as a conservative profile in courage. He's really today's prime exhibit of conservative rot: that they have made it impossible to remember an America in which government employees could answer to a higher calling than the venal political needs of their bosses—before public relations replaced public service. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/04/20/the_gonzales_debacle.php

[JDPriestly]

1. Ironically, the non-partisan civil service was fostered by

Theodore Roosevelt -- a progressive Republican. Ah, the good old days.

[Spinzonner]

2. Not exactly and entirely

He was a very famous and effective commissioner but the system was established during Chester A Arthur's term in the early 1880's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendleton_Civil_Service_Reform_Act