Justice for All

Surely there are a large number of outrageous actions that we have experienced, at least indirectly, in the past 7 years; indeed, so many we probably can't keep all of them in mind or even get them down on a list. But the ones that stay with me most, somewhat to my surprise, are the ones involving the politicization of the Dept. of Justice. I conclude from this that I really do believe we are a nation of laws and not of men and that all those years I was involved in various ways with lawyers and law schools have had an effect on me. (Apparently, less of an effect on John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Stephen Bradbury, etc.)

I'm a reliable reader of Scott Horton, who blogs for Harper's Magazine (read him here: http://www.harpers.org). Horton, who has an impressive legal background, has been following the "little" malice of the DOJ: the work of U.S. Attorneys here and there in the U.S. who have shown themselves to be 'loyal Bushies' by prosecuting Democrats for dubious reasons. The Governor of Alabama, e.g., who seems to have been charged and convicted with accepting a campaign donation from someone he later re-appointed to a state commission. And who cannot appeal his case (although the conviction came some time ago) because the judge in the case has not and, apparently, refuses to release a transcript, which is required before an appeal can be filed. Meanwhile, Siegelman's in prison. Or the Democratic Alabama legislator who is being accused of a federal crime based on charges that she failed to live up sufficiently to her contract with a community college to teach. (Yikes! If I'd known that was a federal crime, I'd have made a point of chatting up the FBI during my university years.) Or the Florida lawyer, former President of the Florida Bar, who is accused of having given another lawyer a legal opinion that the DOJ disagrees with. (He's been charged with conspiracy in a drug money case.) All this while Tom DeLay walks the streets of whatever town in Texas he lives in.

Normally, I'd read this kind of stuff with a certain holdback: ie, 'oh come on, it can't be as bizarre a case as that. Surely you're presenting it for maximum effect.' And maybe that's true, but it's hard to read case after case (Wisconsin, Mississippi+, Alabama++, Florida) and not begin to feel that something is EVEN MORE rotten in the state of Denmark than we had thought. And what really pains me in this is the fact that the lawyers who are participating in these misbegotten cases are people who went to law school, who went to good law schools, who often have been or are judges in the federal or state systems, who have had every opportunity to learn something about basic legal ethics: not the fancy stuff, but the plain stuff: no perjured testimony, no political reprisal charges, no cheap (or even expensive) vengeance (the Florida guy was Al Gore's lawyer in the late 2000 electoral debacle). These are people who will bear a long tail. Their views are undoubtedly widely shared by their friends and colleagues, and they are normalizing such behaviors among lawyers, is my guess. I'm pretty cynical about people and their motives, but I find this kind of thing truly shocking. And I don't know how you root it out when it is so widely disseminated.

So remember the 'little' malfeasances, along with the big ones. You'll have to track them down on your own because none of these cases are being covered by the big media, although John Conyers has been pushing questions at the DOJ to explain the Siegelman case. I fear that these malfeasances are ones that will be with us for a long time. As in Iraq, bad policy is bad policy but there is the possibility of correcting a policy; by contrast, arbitrarily terrorizing civilians or using chaos to even old scores creates a real insurgency that is beyond anyone's control. Either someone must be held accountable for these malfeasances (a bunch of someones actually), or the behavior will spread like wildfire. And will we be any better off if, a year from now, the incumbent Democratic DOJ takes after low-profile Republicans who displease them? Is the 'rule of payback' what we want to substitute for that 'rule of law, not men.'