This whole business of U.S. Attorneys being fired and replaced with partisan hacks because they're prosecuting too many Republicans and not enough Democrats is one of the most shameful things to come out of an Administration notorious for its corruption and general wrongdoing. But the worst of it, in my mind, is that, apart from the somewhat tangential issue of undue Congressional influence, it was not against the law.
The story of how the law was changed has been well-reported yet remains underappreciated. On Monday, Dahlia Lithwick posted an excellent article on Slate whose subtitle asks the relevant question:
Specter Detector
U.S. attorney scandal update: Who's to blame for those alarming Patriot Act revisions?
AlyoshaKaramazov posted a fine diary referencing this very article, but he focuses mostly on the evil results, while I want to raise the issue of the process that got us here. The relevant provision was enacted as part of the Patriot Act reauthorization last year and Arlen Specter's office was responsible for the change, though evidently not Specter himself. As Lithwick puts it:
On Feb. 6, when the Senate held hearings on the issue of prosecutorial independence, former judiciary committee Chairman Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., proudly claimed to have been as clueless as the rest of us. Denying New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer's claim that he or his staff had "slipped the new provision into the Patriot Act in the dead of night," Specter asserted, "The first I found out about the change in the Patriot Act occurred a few weeks ago when Sen. [Dianne] Feinstein approached me on the floor."
So Specter took the matter up with his "very able chief counsel, Michael O'Neill". It turns out that:
... at least according to Specter, O'Neill had merely been following orders from the Department of Justice when he snuck new language into the Patriot Act that would consolidate executive branch authority. Huge relief there. [Emphasis mine.]
I have only one question: WTF? Here we have legislation granting sweeping new powers to an Administration that is not over nice in its regard for constraints on its powers to begin with and apparently no one in the Senate even knew that this was a provision of the law that they were passing.
So, if you have the right connections, you can put provisions of the highest consequence into legislation under consideration without anybody noticing. It gives you a real warm-tummy feeling for the state of our lawmaking process. I mean, the stuff that they're willing to pass with full knowledge and consent is already pretty astonishing. But where does this situation leave us?
I can't believe there is no kind of version control on this stuff-- version control that would be routine in private business for contract negotiations involving only thousands of dollars. I don't even know what the Constitutional remedy could be. Who is authorized to investigate Congress for what seems to me a shocking dereliction of primary duties? And why is there so little outcry?
Specter's standing on the left
The issues involved here are much bigger than those raised by Specter's role. But I want to raise the issue of Specter's standing on the left. He became something of a hero in 2004 for fallling foul of the Bush Administration (and the extreme Right Wing) in matters of Senate discipline. And after last fall's midterms there was a lot of speculation here that he would jump ship and join the Democrats.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who remembers his role as GOP hatchet man against Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. He bears a huge level of responsibility for inflicting a Supreme Court Justice on us who was obviously unfit in addition to being a dangerous ideologue. Now this.
But tell me what you think.