Follow the Pressure: Some Questions About the U.S. Attorney Firings

[babylonsister]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/5980

Follow the Pressure: Some Questions About the U.S. Attorney Firings
by Andrew Bard Schmookler

snip//

An extraordinary event calls for an extraordinary cause. In other words, if a veteran Senator like Dominici deviates from his usual standard of conduct, there must have been some unusual circumstance. I would bet money that before Dominici applied pressure to Inglesias, someone applied pressure to Dominici.


I would like Dominici to be asked: did someone ask you to lean on Inglesias? And then, when you requested his dismissal, did someone ask you to make that request?

I would bet the trail leads either to the White House, or to Attorney General Gonzalez, or --most likely--both.

It has widely been noted that it is altogether unprecedented for a mass-firing of U.S. Attorneys to take place except when there's a change of administrations.

What's also unprecedented is the new legal context in which this contemporary version of the "Saturday Night Massacre" took place. A provision was stuck into the bill renewing the Patriot Act that allows the Attorney General to appoint U.S. Attorneys who can then serve indefinitely without ever requiring congressional approval.

On COUNTDOWN, Professor Turley (the constitutional scholar) drew the reasonable inference that this provision was put into the Patriot Act precisely to facilitate the political purge of the ranks of the U.S. Attorneys that has now ensued. "Political purge" seems the reasonable description: despite all these people being loyal Republicans, they apparently were not (as Turley put it) willing to be sufficiently "lock-step" in serving the political interests of the administration.

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[BOSSHOG]

1. Eventually

I'll be supporting a monument to Richard Nixon. He's fast becoming one of the greatest republicans presidents of the past 50 years. "Political purge." Like purging crawfish, drown them till they puke up dirt; then boil them alive, then eat them. It sounds like a rovian passtime in the political world. I do love my crawfish.

[Fresh_Start]

2. Maybe all the other US Attorney's should be questioned

about if/when political pressure was brought to bear against them

[kestrel91316]

4. The ones who weren't fired will simply lie if questioned.

They are they loyalists.

[Geoff R. Casavant]

5. There was another post to that effect

We know what happened to the eight that refused to bow to pressure. What about the ones who caved, or the ones who needed no pressure to begin with?

Someone crunched the numbers and learned Democratic candidates and office holders were 7 or 8 times as likely to be investigated than Republicans.

[kestrel91316]

3. It's obvious to me that they were deemed

insufficiently fascist. So they were removed. End of subject.

"Political purge" seems the reasonable description: despite all these people being loyal Republicans, they apparently were not (as Turley put it) willing to be sufficiently "lock-step" in serving the political interests of the administration