Justice Is Missing at the Department of Justice

To say that the internal investigative report on the hiring practices at the Department of Justice was disturbing is to put it mildly.

In case you missed it, the department’s Office of the Inspector General and the Office of Professional Responsibility conducted a probe into the hiring practices of Monica M. Goodling, a top aide to then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The report’s findings were disturbing and shocking.

There are two basic categories of government jobs: political appointees and civil service employees. From her position at the Justice Department, Goodling exercised oversight and control over both categories of jobs. And in that position, she regularly crossed the line about just every opportunity.

For example, she regularly had applicants for career civil service positions fill out forms designed for those applying for political jobs. Applicants were forced to reveal their party affiliations, which political parties they’d donated to and their religious beliefs. The extent of the unprofessional conduct of Goodling and her aides, according to the internal investigation, was more widespread and pervasive than Goodling admitted in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee.

Just consider the questions Goodling asked of one job applicant after another: “What’s your opinion on gay marriage?”, “What’s your position on abortion?” and “What public figure do you admire most?”

That last one, while rather innocuous on paper, could have curious results. The Washington Post reported that one interviewee’s reply of “Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice” brought a frown across Goodling’s face and the retort, “But she’s pro-choice.”

Goodling also had her hand in “screening” (the polite term for her input) into the nomination of immigration judges, career civil service positions. According to the internal investigation, positions were never openly advertised, applicants were solicited from Republican members of Congress and vetted through the White House for their views on immigration. Tremendous case backlogs built up due to the slowness of the political vetting process, almost bringing the entire system to a standstill.

And the Gonzalez/Goodling crowd’s explanation? “Oops, we thought they were political appointees” sums it up. Right.

Unfortunately, the Justice Department has often been rife with the undue influence of politics and occasionally nepotism. President John Kennedy appointed his inexperienced kid brother, Robert F. Kennedy, as attorney general in 1961. Less than a decade later, President Richard Nixon installed his own political crony, John Mitchell, at the helm of the department, with disastrous consequences.

The extent to which Gonzales, a pal of President Bush from his days as Texas governor and the former White House counsel, politicized the department appears to be on par with the worst of attorneys general in history.

Among all the Executive branch departments, the role of the Justice Department is unique. It’s less of a political agency than any other department that comes under the control of the White House. Politics at the Commerce Department? Well, sure. At Education? No doubt about it.

But the Department of Justice is supposed to be the watchdog of government on behalf of the average citizen. Under the reign of Gonzales and his ideological henchmen, that appears not to have been the case.

“Equal protection under the law,” “justice is blind” and just about all of the amendments compromising the Bill of Rights seem to have been foreign concepts to that crowd.

When the people running the department in charge of enforcing the laws of the nation are blatantly ignoring and violating the laws that apply to them, public confidence quickly erodes.

President Bush, Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Congress need to move quickly to clean house at Justice and bring to account those responsible for this egregious behavior.

The quicker the better.