[quote]WASHINGTON (AP) - The Senate voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to end the Bush administration’s ability to unilaterally fill U.S. attorney vacancies as a backlash to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ firing of eight federal prosecutors [including US Proscecuting Attorney Carol Lam, who busted Republican Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham for the single largest case of corruption in US congressional history]…
…Also, the Senate by a 94-2 vote passed a bill that would cancel the attorney general’s power to appoint U.S. attorneys without Senate confirmation. Democrats say the Bush administration abused that authority when it fired the eight prosecutors and proposed replacing some with White House loyalists. [/quote]
I was going to post this in the [url=http://tw.forumosa.com/t/repubs-use-patriot-act-to-axe-prosecutors-investigating-them/35153/1 use Patriot Act to axe prosecutors investigating them[/url] thread I started a while back, but that thread has proven such an embarrassment to GOP supporters in this forum that they’ve basically called a boycott on posting in it…obviously hoping if no one responds it will sink below the eye-line of casual viewers.
Great. This privilege had been in place before. Reagan replaced ALL the attorneys under his authority. Anyway, with 1.5 years to go, this will really affect only the next president who may be a Democrat. Wonder how they will like this new precedent THEN… haha Keep it coming!
[quote]Mr. Rove’s claims today that the Bush administration’s purge of qualified and capable U.S. attorneys is “normal and ordinary” is pure fiction. Replacing most U.S. attorneys when a new administration comes in — as we did in 1993 and the Bush administration did in 2001 — is not unusual. But the Clinton administration never fired federal prosecutors as pure political retribution. These U.S. attorneys received positive performance reviews from the Justice Department and were then given no reason for their firings.
We’re used to this White House distorting the facts to blame the Clinton administration for its failures. Apparently, it’s also willing to distort the facts and invoke the Clinton administration to try to justify its bad behavior.
Josh Marshall added this morning:
First, we now know — or at least the White House is trying to tell us — that they considered firing all the US Attorneys at the beginning of Bush’s second term. That would have been unprecedented but not an abuse of power in itself. The issue here is why these US Attorneys were fired and the fact that the White House intended to replace them with US Attorneys not confirmed by the senate. We now have abundant evidence that they were fired for not sufficiently politicizing their offices, for not indicting enough Democrats on bogus charges or for too aggressively going after Republicans. (Remember, Carol Lam is still the big story here.) We also now know that the top leadership of the Justice Department lied both to the public and to Congress about why the firing took place. As an added bonus we know the whole plan was hatched at the White House with the direct involvement of the president.
And Clinton? Every new president appoints new US Attorneys. That always happens. Always…. The whole thing is silly. But a lot of reporters on the news are already falling for it. The issue here is why these US Attorneys were fired — a) because they weren’t pursuing a GOP agenda of indicting Democrats, that’s a miscarriage of justice, and b) because they lied to Congress about why it happened.[/quote]
And please, Fred. Put your partisanship aside for a minute. Can you please explain to me how it could possibly be defensible to fire the federal prosecutor who nailed Duke Cunningham??? This is just rampant abuse of power. It’s politics at the nastiest level. Its the utmost lack of character, coming from the people who just love using such words to get kneejerk reactions from mom-baseball-and-apple-pie folks in those corn-belt and bible-belt parts of America. MFGR did a great job in describing it: instead of improving their party by driving out rampant corruption, your people circled their wagons and…ah, go read the other thread for God’s sake. We’ve got enough info on this scandal to fill a library, and you sarcastically pipe up as if none of it was even worth commenting on.