When In Doubt, Do Right

The title of this post is a homily that makes her smile, but Elizabeth de la Vega remembers it fondly from the early days of her years in the U.S. justice system. Soon to be made into a movie, her book "United States v. George W. Bush et al." details some of the outrages that are becoming horribly familiar to the U.S. public. She wrote on Monday about some of the horrors she has witnessed.

I spent last Thursday watching Sampson testify about the White House choreographed firings of seven U.S. Attorneys who were chafers. I was compelled to watch, even though, having worked for more than 21 years as an Assistant United States Attorney myself, I considered the revelation of this latest outrage to be the least horrific of a long string of horrors carried out by the Bush administration in the name of the Department of Justice for the advancement of the Republican Party.

To satisfy the tobacco lobby, for instance, President Bush's Department of Justice (DOJ) appointees gutted the most significant case ever brought against the giant tobacco companies. To assuage the Republican base, Bush's DOJ brought an unprecedented number of civil rights cases on behalf of non-minorities, while drastically limiting its traditional affirmative-action lawsuits. In order to portray themselves as representatives of the party most likely to make the American people feel safe -- a cherished nugget of political wisdom from Karl Rove's constant polling activities -- Bush's Attorneys General have sanctioned, caused to be carried out, and/or turned a blind eye to the use of illegal spying on citizens, illegal detentions at Guantanamo and elsewhere, kidnappings and "extraordinary renditions" to countries which the State Department has classified as the most egregious of human rights violators and, worst of all, administration-sanctioned acts of torture.

It is these activities that, to adopt the words of a fellow former Assistant United States Attorney and lifelong Republican, "turn my stomach."
(snip)
It never occurred to me that anyone would behave otherwise, but then again, I was young -- and I hadn't been around Karl Rove. On the other hand, the judge, [then her employer] a Republican, had been around his share of rogues. Indeed, he had survived an administration that was remarkably similar to the one we have today. Years before I clerked for him, he had been appointed United States Attorney by President Richard Nixon. As his first official act, the judge had selected a trusted colleague to be his First Assistant and they both went about their business.

One day not long afterwards, however, the judge returned from lunch to find a member of Nixon's legal staff waiting for him: The man had traveled from Washington, D.C to tell him that he had to fire his First Assistant because he was a Democrat. What did the judge do? He told the lawyer to get out of his office -- politely, I would imagine -- and not come back. That was the end of the matter.

Oh, the good old days during the Nixon regime when an honest judge survives doing the right thing. No wonder the present maladministration was forced to sink to the appointment of a shill without any personal standards to administer the end to a Rule of Law.

A few career attorneys with a sense of honor will survive the cretin in chief's next two years. It will be high time to start reinstating honesty and justice in that department then. There seems to be no attempt to keep a system of justice alive in a time of criminality and criminal appointments. Hopefully there will be no worse damage than has already been done, but it is only hope, not belief, that keeps the staff at that department attempting to prop up the constitution until this cabal leaves the White House one way or another.