Both my paralegal and my associate tell me I have been grumpy today. I know they are right. Since lunch my encounters with them and with a couple of clients have been tense.
I have been wondering why I have been so grumpy. Nothing any of them have done. Then it struck me, just after lunch I read two very important articles on the net. The first is a Boston Globe article about a speech Ted Kennedy made yesterday in which he
accused President Bush of using the Department of Justice to further his administration's "right-wing ideology," saying that veteran prosecutors were replaced by political operatives in key states to ensure that "reliable partisans" are in place in time for the 2008 presidential election.The second is an LA Times OP-Ed by Joseph Rich in which he points out that
At least two of the recently fired U.S. attorneys, John McKay in Seattle and David C. Iglesias in New Mexico, were targeted largely because they refused to prosecute voting fraud cases that implicated Democrats or voters likely to vote for Democrats.So far none of this is news to me or readers of this blog. What Rich really drives home is what makes me so grumpy.
This pattern also extended to hiring. In March 2006, Bradley Schlozman was appointed interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo. Two weeks earlier, the administration was granted the authority to make such indefinite appointments without Senate confirmation. That was too bad: A Senate hearing might have uncovered Schlozman's central role in politicizing the civil rights division during his three-year tenure.That is what has made me so grumpy. I can't be sure Democrats who might be charged in the Western District of Missouri are receiving justice or a Just Us from the local US Attorney. His background puts a whole new cast on the recent charge filed against well known Democrat Katherine Shields during her run for mayor of Kansas City. I will never be able to have much confidence in the winner, Blue Girl's candidate, closet Republican Mark Funkhouser. Sometimes reading an op-ed makes you grumpy.
Schlozman, for instance, was part of the team of political appointees that approved then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's plan to redraw congressional districts in Texas, which in 2004 increased the number of Republicans elected to the House. Similarly, Schlozman was acting assistant attorney general in charge of the division when the Justice Department OKd a Georgia law requiring voters to show photo IDs at the polls. These decisions went against the recommendations of career staff, who asserted that such rulings discriminated against minority voters. The warnings were prescient: Both proposals were struck down by federal courts.
Schlozman continued to influence elections as an interim U.S. attorney. Missouri had one of the closest Senate races in the country last November, and a week before the election, Schlozman brought four voter fraud indictments against members of an organization representing poor and minority people. This blatantly contradicted the department's long-standing policy to wait until after an election to bring such indictments because a federal criminal investigation might affect the outcome of the vote. The timing of the Missouri indictments could not have made the administration's aims more transparent.
