Moses Kagan's Aurora Borealis

Now that we have further proof that Monica Goodling, Alberto Gonzelez's aide, subverted the civil service laws designed to protect the jobs of career government workers from political interference, I have a few questions:

1. Will Goodling and the other guilty parties be punished? Is there any doubt that what they did (perverting the hiring process in the Justice Department such that non-partisan or Democratic leaning candidates could not be hired or promoted) was worse for the country than, say, some crackhead robbing a liquor store? At the very least, these people ought to be disbarred, convicted in court, and run out of Washington D.C. on a rail.
   
2. What about the political hacks they hired? Do the civil service laws that Goodling ignored now protect these incompetents from a thorough house-cleaning after the election?

This is most assuredly NOT an isolated incident. The Republican Party has gone beyond mere disagreement with the laws and regulations it dislikes. Instead, under President Bush, the GOP has been relentless in subverting the power and credibility of those parts of the Executive Branch tasked with enforcing rules it finds disagreeable, the Justice Department being just one example.

We Americans have endured the consequences in ways large and small: the response to Katrina by the cronies running FEMA, the bungling of the Iraq occupation after the Administration transferred authority from the "unfriendly" State Department to the more pliable Defense Department, the lack of enforcement of voting rights protections for minorities during recent elections by the Voting Rights office of the Justice Deparment, and the un-ending stream of recalls of unsafe food and toys by the under-staffed and under-funded FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection (whose Bush-appointed leader actually testified to Congress that she did not want more power and money to police toy companies), to name a few.

These were not accidents. They were the foreseeable outcomes of policies cooked up by an Administration staffed by people who believe that government, all government, is bad.

Labels: Bush, Monica Goodling, Republicans