The Julie Myers Nomination, And Its Critics:
In the last week, Michelle Malkin, Red State, the National Review, and many other conservative blogs and bloggers have harshly criticized the nomination of Julie L. Myers to be Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (aka ICE). The basic theme of the criticism is that Myers is a political crony: she's only 36, she's the niece of the outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and her husband is Michael Chertoff's chief of staff. Someone who has used her connections to get such a important job shouldn't be confirmed, the thinking goes.
Given the reluctance on the Right to criticize the Administration, my first reaction was to assume that these criticisms must be justified. But the more I think about it, the less sure I am as to why the Myers nomination is objectionable. (Full disclosure: I have met Myers once or twice, although I don't think I have ever had a conversation with her.) Although young, Myers has significant experience in law enforcement. She is a former Assistant U.S. Attorney, served as the Assistant Secretary for Export Enforcement at Treasury, and was the Chief of Staff to the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division at DOJ. She is also very smart, as her credentials suggest: she's a Cornell Law grad and former Eighth Circuit clerk. Finally, Myers has the trust of the head of Homeland Security: the Assistant AG at DOJ for whom she served as Chief of Staff was Michael Chertoff himself.
Critics of the Myers nomination have focused mostly on her husband and her uncle. Her husband is Michael Chertoff's current Chief of Staff, they point out, suggesting that he helped her get the nomination. I don't understand how that is supposed to work: Julie Myers served as Chertoff's Chief of Staff before her husband did. To the extent Myers has inside connections with Chertoff, it's because she worked with Chertoff everyday as his Chief of Staff, not because she recently married someone who has her old job. Critics also point out that Myers is related to Richard Myers, outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But as best I can tell, no one has suggested that General Myers has improperly used his influence to help his niece get the job at Homeland Security.
What explains the opposition to the Myers nomination? Much of the problem is Michael Brown. Brown resigned as head of FEMA just three days before a Senate hearing on the Myers nomination. Brown's disastrous performance as FEMA head has drawn attention to the question of whether the President is nominating qualified people to staff important agencies, and the timing of the Myers nomination is letting that attention fall on Myers. The Myers nomination provides a particularly convenient focal point on the Right; criticizing Myers lets conservatives blow off steam about the Administration's missteps on Katrina without doing so directly. Finally, my sense is that some on the right object to Myers because they feel she is too close to Chertoff, who has not made enforcement of immigration laws a particular priority. The thinking seems to be that one way to get the Administration to devote more attention to enforcing the immigration laws is to defeat Myers and make sure she is replaced with a more independent leader.
In the end, I don't know enough about ICE or Julie Myers to say whether she would be an effective leader of the agency. If ICE needs a real shake-up, then we should be debating that in the open, and it may be that Myers isn't the best person to change the agency. There are also legitimate questions about whether she has satisifed the statutory requirements of the position, and those questions need to be addressed. Nonetheless, my sense is that critics are being unfair to Myers by portraying her as an unqualified political crony; I don't see any reason to doubt that she is a smart and competent public servant.
Given the reluctance on the Right to criticize the Administration, my first reaction was to assume that these criticisms must be justified. But the more I think about it, the less sure I am as to why the Myers nomination is objectionable. (Full disclosure: I have met Myers once or twice, although I don't think I have ever had a conversation with her.) Although young, Myers has significant experience in law enforcement. She is a former Assistant U.S. Attorney, served as the Assistant Secretary for Export Enforcement at Treasury, and was the Chief of Staff to the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division at DOJ. She is also very smart, as her credentials suggest: she's a Cornell Law grad and former Eighth Circuit clerk. Finally, Myers has the trust of the head of Homeland Security: the Assistant AG at DOJ for whom she served as Chief of Staff was Michael Chertoff himself.
Critics of the Myers nomination have focused mostly on her husband and her uncle. Her husband is Michael Chertoff's current Chief of Staff, they point out, suggesting that he helped her get the nomination. I don't understand how that is supposed to work: Julie Myers served as Chertoff's Chief of Staff before her husband did. To the extent Myers has inside connections with Chertoff, it's because she worked with Chertoff everyday as his Chief of Staff, not because she recently married someone who has her old job. Critics also point out that Myers is related to Richard Myers, outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But as best I can tell, no one has suggested that General Myers has improperly used his influence to help his niece get the job at Homeland Security.
What explains the opposition to the Myers nomination? Much of the problem is Michael Brown. Brown resigned as head of FEMA just three days before a Senate hearing on the Myers nomination. Brown's disastrous performance as FEMA head has drawn attention to the question of whether the President is nominating qualified people to staff important agencies, and the timing of the Myers nomination is letting that attention fall on Myers. The Myers nomination provides a particularly convenient focal point on the Right; criticizing Myers lets conservatives blow off steam about the Administration's missteps on Katrina without doing so directly. Finally, my sense is that some on the right object to Myers because they feel she is too close to Chertoff, who has not made enforcement of immigration laws a particular priority. The thinking seems to be that one way to get the Administration to devote more attention to enforcing the immigration laws is to defeat Myers and make sure she is replaced with a more independent leader.
In the end, I don't know enough about ICE or Julie Myers to say whether she would be an effective leader of the agency. If ICE needs a real shake-up, then we should be debating that in the open, and it may be that Myers isn't the best person to change the agency. There are also legitimate questions about whether she has satisifed the statutory requirements of the position, and those questions need to be addressed. Nonetheless, my sense is that critics are being unfair to Myers by portraying her as an unqualified political crony; I don't see any reason to doubt that she is a smart and competent public servant.
Can you name any executive branch nominees in the last few decades who were "the best qualified for the job"?
2. You can see that she has had minimal experience as the leader and manager of a large, hierarchical organization.
It is the latter sort of experience, which is missing from her resume. You can "think" it unimportant, but that doesn't mean that it is unimportant. You can think, as she evidently does, that she can rely on advisors and subordinates to tell her what she does not know.
Would she really be a "bad" executive? What is a "bad" executive? What is "bad" leadership? Is it unwise to start someone at the top of a large organization?
If one is willing to argue that the president should receive considerable deference to his choice of Judge Roberts to the Supreme Court because that is the sort of judge the President said he would nominate and the President was re-elected, then with the President having been re-elected on a platform of neglect toward immigration law enforcement, is this the sort of person whom we ought to have expected him to nominate to head ICE?
Why don't we just cut out the middleman and hire someone who is knowledgeable in the area, so Myers doesn't lose important things playing telephone with those who are actually qualified to do the job.
Same reason, I assume, that we don't hire the best soldier to be Secretary of Defense.
(And Youth of Christ: did you get lost on the way to somewhere else?)
It seems to me there is an important difference between giving the president room to appoint people of his ideological stripe compared to providing the opportunity to appoint a friend of friend. Often, this line is a bit ambiguous and this specific instance appears to be no exception. Cronyism is bad when it leads people to neglect necessary skills when filling a position.
1. No experience running a large organization.
2. No practical law enforcement experience (being a political overseer at Treasury and being a prosecutor is not the same as actual law enforcement experience).
3. Way too young. If Clinton had nominated a 36 year old lawyer to a similarly sensitive law enforcement and national security position, the Republican Senate would have had a field day mocking him. Bush should be treated no differently.
Surely the Republican Party can field more qualified appointees than Myers. If not, what does that say about the law enforement bona fides of a supposedly law-and-order party?
Immigration needs some more original thought than "build more walls, send out more police, have a war on immigrants, lock up those who employ illegals."
I like the idea of doing with Mexico and similar places what we do with Puerto Rico. I hear the average stay of people from PR is about 3 years, compared to much longer for those who come in illegally.
The USA is a place of wages that exceed by a factor of 5-10 the wages in Mexico, etc., but expenses are also higher by a similar factor.
If we let folks from Mexico come and go with say 3-4 year work visas, we squash the coyotes who could import terrorists.
Myers looks like one who could think outside the box more than someone who rose through the ranks at ICE (and would tend to have a bias toward maintaining the status quo or expanding ICE).
John Marshall
Robert Kennedy
Experience sometimes equates to stagnation, caution and old, mistaken ways of looking at things. When an orginization is really dysfunctional, a young, inexpert person with energy, ability, and the trust of the person in charge can be the best sort of person to set things right.
Sometimes people's status as cronies comes about partially because of their competence and skills. I hadn't realized that she was Chertoff's chief of staff. Perhaps we ought to wonder about nepotism with respect to her husband's job?
cathy :-)
But in addition, a JD degree provides almost no relevant training for this sort of job, and, I would further suggest, some of the training that a JD provides is counterproductive in a managerial position.
For me, an MBA would be far more useful in this sort of job, or the public sector equivalents. In those programs, you are taught such useful things as how to manage people, how to delegate, how to read a balance sheet, etc. You get none of this in law school.
When did PR become a state? I must have missed that. They have no votes for President, no one in Congress. They have a special status.
The point is, by making entry and exit relatively painless (but regulated) we may hurt ourseles little (compared to where we are now) and we may get much better control of the borders.
Those who say people in Mexico will flock to the USA and never leave, for the wages, benefits, etc., should look at PR, where that sort of one way influx does not occur, despite low wages in PR and limited PR government services.
I like the idea of writing laws based on the facts as they are, not based on the sorts of ideas that motivated alcohol prohibition. Again, I suggest some thinking outside the box, rather than "send more guards to the borders, etc."
Given that law school is entirely about analysis and problem-solving, I'd say we could use more lawyers in public service, not fewer (not necessarily functioning as lawyers, however), given that most of the time government appears oblivious to the problems in its process and flow.
(I say all of this as a nascent J.D who knows about delegating, managing, and reading balance sheets after doing a long tour in retail management: they are learnable skills that require no letters, I learned them all before I got my first degree.)
8 U.S.C. ยง 1402.
It would therefore be a violation of the 14th Amendment's P&I clause to deny them ingress and egress to and from CONUS.
Isn't loyalty something to be cultivated and rewarded?
Robert Rubin?
Back to PR for a moment. As I understand the situation, PR has on-going debates about a) statehood or b) independence or c) staying the way it is now. Now I believe they pay no income tax to the US while in PR, plus they get to come and go as statutory citizens. Not sure they are more than citizens by statute (implementing a treaty) which I presume either side could decide to set aside.
Treating Mexicans who wish to work in the US for 3-4 years like we treat PR folks (minus the voting in the US) would presumably generate tax revenues, helping to fund ICE, etc.
I am not convinced Bush wants anything to do with the hard-fisted "punish the employers, build walls, hire more cops" approach to ICE that red state folks seem to favor.
to those who think young blood is needed to reinvigorate ICE: do you really think that Myers was nominated to invigorate the organization? A more plausible explanation is that she was intended to be a loyalist who will not rock the boat and make Chertoff seasick. If you want to invigorate ICE, appoint a 50-year old with 25 years of law enforcement experience (all of it outside customs and immigration) and the spine to tell more senior officials what they have been doing wrong.
However, if we were to objectively look at all the possible choices for this position, and if I were to say that there's a former AUSA whose held several key positions in the administration, including chief of staff to the current Secretary of Homeland Security ... and if I posited that this person were nominated to be a Assistant Secretary under that same Department head, no one would blink an eye. But mention the other "suspect" attributes Ms. Meyers allegedly possesses, and some people have a fit.
What's the problem with some young blood, especially when that young blood has law enforcement experience and the trust of those with whom she will be working?
As for management experience, can anyone really point to the head of any federal agency that has has the type of management experience to lead a huge organization? Reading some of the commentary, you'd think that only CEOs of huge corporations are fit to lead federal agencies like this. (As anyone who has worked in the federal government knows, however, it's not political appointees who run the day-to-day operations of an agency. Agency heads generally lead with policy decisions, leaving the "mundane" issues to career employees.)
To those who question Ms. Myers' credentials, I therefore say, who better to lead this agency than a young, ambitious, law enforcement-minded individual who has the trust and confidence of the Secretary of Homeland Security? Sorry if I sound like a cheerleader, but I'm frankly tired of the bandwagon attacks on this public servant.
Doug
But experienced or not, right after the Brown media/political storm is the worst time for anyone to get an appointment. She's facing scrutiny that wouldn't have existed, from the Left or the Right, one month ago.
My question is: Where were Michelle Malkin and Redstate, and all the liberal anti-Michael-Brown pundits when Brown was appointed?
Hopefully we're learning to be observant of appointment proceedings, but it's probably just temporary backlash.
I would put SecState Powell and Rice up there too. I think in particular Dr. Rice is probably better than any since Kissinger. You might suggest cronyism here, but it is turning out (IMHO) that her close connection to the President IS helping her. Those she deals with know that she speaks for him, and not just Foggy Bottom. I have to add the completely racist and sexist comment that her appearance does credit to our beliefs. You have this diminuative Black woman dominating whatever grouping you see her in. When we go into the third world, and when our competition do, who are they going to trust more - the white country that puts a white man in this position, or that puts a black woman there, esp. given that she is also smarter and more articulate than her competition? What must be remembered is that much of the 3rd world is of color, as is she.
I don't disagree that the ability to analyze is important. But I still don't concede your point. In my work experience in larger companies, my best managers have been MBAs, and the worst JDs (with one exception). My first point is that an MBA is going to give you more relevant tools than is a JD. And, secondly, that you are more likely to find people who can manage people well from the ranks of MBAs than from the ranks of JDs simply because there are a lot more MBAs getting the relevant experience. And note that we are not talking hiring the financial analyst who is still, years later, doing just that, but, through a Darwinian process of Survival of the Fittest, has risen through the ranks by being able to manage effectively.
I assume by your comments that you are an atty. or at least have a JD or are working on such, because they seem to portray what I consider the attorneys' arrogance, that their (our) training is the best possible for almost any job.
But one problem is that most attorneys have not managed more than a small number of people. Many MBAs have, and this is something that has to be learned. Not all can do it. I couldn't, despite having both degrees. I am, frankly, not suited by my temperament to that sort of work (which is why I practice patent law). I do best when I have to learn something in depth. The more depth the better. This is a far cry from making things happen when you have dozens of balls in the air at once (I can handle a couple, but don't multitask very well - rather my forte is in concentrating on one at a time).
I do know that many attorneys have to handle a lot of things going on at once - my father had to in his practice. But still, the emphasis is on doing as much of the job yourself or with a very small group. In most legal jobs, there is little incentive or opportunity to delegate work to larger groups, and in particular, extremely large organizations. That is just not how we are trained to work. And note that attorneys are personally responsible for everything they sign - which too makes a lot of delegation difficult.
And the suggestion that this is easy to do I think is mistaken. I frankly don't think that Bill Clinton, one of the smartest JDs out there, really ever got that good at it. He seemed to run his presidency as a series of pizza fueled all nighters, where he would jump into a problem and have to totally master it. In short, he ran the country like a lot of lawyers run their law practices. But every time an attorney does this, he loses breadth. IMHO, proper delegation would make this unnecessary - not that the manager wouldn't have to learn at least some of the details, but not even Bill Clinton could come close to mastering all the details involved in running this country. Indeed, even with his formidable brain, he couldn't come close. So, it seemed like when he would concentrate on one thing, the rest of his administration would flounder - often going off in their own directions (and this is a major problem with the federal government, given all of the agencies and constituencies involved). Oh, and note that Clinton had these problems despite having significant executive experience as governor of Arkansas. What about all those lawyers who haven't been governor of a state?
That is why I am suggesting that you can't just step in and learn delegation and management on the spot. It is something that takes a lot of time and practice to learn. To do it right, you have to have made mistakes - as we all invariably do. You have to have delegated things to the wrong people. You have to have missed important stuff because someone below you didn't keep you informed.