Report on Politicalization of Hiring for the DOJ Honors Program:
We've heard about this before, but the latest report by the DOJ Office of Inspector General on the politicalization of Honors Program hiring at the Justice Department adds a great deal of detail. A few thoughts:
(1) The basic picture is just disgraceful. The Honors Program is a jewel of the Justice Department, and I think it's very troubling that some within the Bush Justice Department would see it as a way to screen candidates for ideology.
(2) I was glad but not surprised to read in the report about political officials within DOJ (such as Peter Keisler) who didn't play along or otherwise tried to limit the political emphasis in hiring.
(3) Although I'm not aware of anything like this happening during the Clinton years, I doubt politics was entirely irrelevant to hiring at the time. When I applied to the Honors Program in the fall of 1997 (and was accepted), it was generally understood among conservative/libertarian applicants that being conservative/libertarian was a negative on a DOJ Honors Program application. It wasn't necessarily an automatic ding, except of course at the Civil Rights Division. But it was a negative in an intensely competitive process. As a result, it was common not to list extracurricular activities that signaled conservative/libertarian viewpoints and that were the kind of thing that an applicant might or might not list on a resume depending on the job. I followed that practice in my case. I remember thinking at the time that I wouldn't have gotten the job otherwise.
(4) The Bush DOJ officials presumably saw themselves as trying to balance out Main Justice. When I was at Main Justice in the Clinton years, it was heavily Democratic among career lawyers: even in the Criminal Division, which you might think leans more conservative than other sections, most lawyers were Democrats. Still, none of that excuses the kind of political hiring that apparently went on. The goal should have been to even the playing field, if it needed evening, not to engage in affirmative action for conservatives.
(1) The basic picture is just disgraceful. The Honors Program is a jewel of the Justice Department, and I think it's very troubling that some within the Bush Justice Department would see it as a way to screen candidates for ideology.
(2) I was glad but not surprised to read in the report about political officials within DOJ (such as Peter Keisler) who didn't play along or otherwise tried to limit the political emphasis in hiring.
(3) Although I'm not aware of anything like this happening during the Clinton years, I doubt politics was entirely irrelevant to hiring at the time. When I applied to the Honors Program in the fall of 1997 (and was accepted), it was generally understood among conservative/libertarian applicants that being conservative/libertarian was a negative on a DOJ Honors Program application. It wasn't necessarily an automatic ding, except of course at the Civil Rights Division. But it was a negative in an intensely competitive process. As a result, it was common not to list extracurricular activities that signaled conservative/libertarian viewpoints and that were the kind of thing that an applicant might or might not list on a resume depending on the job. I followed that practice in my case. I remember thinking at the time that I wouldn't have gotten the job otherwise.
(4) The Bush DOJ officials presumably saw themselves as trying to balance out Main Justice. When I was at Main Justice in the Clinton years, it was heavily Democratic among career lawyers: even in the Criminal Division, which you might think leans more conservative than other sections, most lawyers were Democrats. Still, none of that excuses the kind of political hiring that apparently went on. The goal should have been to even the playing field, if it needed evening, not to engage in affirmative action for conservatives.
(1) It's 1993. You talk to Candidate A, and you realize as you pleasantly converse that he is a sharp guy, with his head screwed on straight. In addition to being a top-notch lawyer, he believes fervently in helping the disadvantaged, particularly those who have suffered from racial or sexist bias, and also in preserving our natural heritage for future generations through sensible government regulation of the greedy impulses of the short-sighted private sector...move him to the A list!
(2) It';s 2002. You talk to Candidate B, and you realize as you pleasantly converse etc. In addition to being a top-notch lawyer, he believes fervently that individual liberty is the foundation for a free society, and even though young understands that the weight of the law and government mean that the utmost discretion and modesty are called for in its operation, to avoid inadvertantly trampling the initiative and spirit of free men...move him to the A list!
It's not a question of sticking a probe in some orifice and reading off D or R. Normal people can't make a clear distinction between what they consider good sense and being in political alignment. You can always come along afterwards and dissect it, perhaps, just like you can dissect what Hemingway meant about the fish. But it's probably just as sterile an undertaking.
2. Hooray for people like Peter Keisler, Eileen O'Connor, and Daniel Fridman, who refused to play ball. Not that the Democrats currently holding up Keisler's DC Circuit nomination will deign to give him any credit (while they simultaneously excoriate this incident), but still...
3. I don't doubt that a "political" element seeps into all hiring of honors attorneys, at least at the margins; viz., (1) someone who is similarly situated with another candidate might get the subconscious nod because his/her sympathies align with the DOJ's mission during a particular administration; (2) someone who is on the fence after looking at grades/school/journals might get a bump up or down along the same lines; or (3) someone whose political/ideological views just aren't compatible with the enforcement of the laws as they are written might get the boot, even if otherwise qualified (we're talking ultimate fringe elements here). These considerations might have subconsciously guided the hiring process during the Clinton years (to note what Prof. Kerr said) as well as the 2002 hiring year that the report covered (when the data showed a strong skew toward conservative applicants, but there was no other evidence from the decisionmakers suggesting intent or overt bias -- although it sure was a pretty strong skew).
But this is a huge difference from what was going on at DOJ in 2006, according to the report -- where ridiculously qualified applicants were struck for the most superficial political or ideological reasons.
By the way, what a shock that this Esther McDonald character was interviewed and hired by Monica Goodling. Is there anything that woman touched at DOJ that she did not poison? What an embarrassment.
I'm speaking as a grad of a tier four law grad here - I'd like the Department of Justice to hire the best, and generally speaking that would probably involve hiring many HLS grads. Turning down good, qualified candidates in favor of inferior, ideologically correct candidates is no way to run "a jewel of the Justice Department."
DU
Yep. That's just what the Bush Administration was looking for.
Second, the report provides a number of egregious examples that, even accounting for such gray areas, there's just no accounting for, other than pure politics over merit. Granted, you can debate whether DOJ should be permitted to hire more people sympathetic to the administration's legal mission, but (a) DOJ policies and civil service law simply don't permit hiring decisions to be made on the basis of political affiliation, and (b) the report indicates that this wasn't even an overarching policy of DOJ -- it was just several individuals who decided to base their hiring decisions on politics/ideology.
Page 41 of the Report (emphasis added). The real scandal is that conservative candidates were never given a fair chance by the component divisions that forwarded applications to the screening committee. In 2006, there were five times as many liberal candidates as conservative candidates sent by the component divisions to the screeners. (The data also show a skew in favor of liberal candidates in 2002, although there it was only 2-to-1, rather than the 5-to-1 in 2006.)
There's your political interference - it is by the left-wing careerists who take the first cut at which candidates to forward on to the screeners. Indeed, even after the supposed illegal political intereference in 2006 by those nasty Bushies, there were still 67 liberal candidates who were approved and only 23 conservative candidates. So the effect of the illegal political interference in 2006 was to change the initial pool of candidates selected by the component divisions from 5-to-1 liberal all the way down to 3-to-1 liberal.
But of course, no one is ever going to talk about the fact that the pool forwarded to the screeners by the component divisions was overwhelmingly liberal. Because the only possible political interference in hiring can be by those nasty Bushies - nobody would ever believe that liberals (who are always good hearted and fair minded) in the component divisions would skew the pool that went to the screeners in the first place.
I thought that was the point...
The myth of an apolitical DOJ is a fantasy of a modern legal-academic mind not borne out of any historically American or democratic or constitutional theory. The DOJ is not the judiciary, and vice-versa. Elections are consequential, as they should be. Our criminal justice system relies heavily on the discretion of the prosecutors in the executive branch. That discretion MUST be subject to democratic accountability. Under the DOJ-independence theory, what recourse would American citizens have if they were strongly dissatisfied with the types and methods of prosecutions undertaken in our name? And as James Q. Wilson pointed out on this blog, having the criminal justice executives subject to the will of the voters has served this country very well as compared to Britain, where it is far removed from the will of the people.
Now, a strong argument could be made to de-unify the executive branch and have separate election for Attorney General, but that would obviously require a constitutional amendment.
Darn spell check clicking....
"it was generally understood among conservative/libertarian applicants that being conservative/libertarian was a negative on a DOJ Honors Program application".
This ain't politics in general or Clinton style? It seems that way to me.
Re: Point (3):
Could you provide your readers with evidence other than your own
paranoid delusions of liberal persecutionsubjective impressions of others' subjective impressions of the Clinton Administration's DoJ honors program application process to add credence to the claim that the process was biased against qualified non-liberal/Democratic candidates; or are you just slinging mud?Sorry, don't buy it.
The Justice Department sits in a weird tension. On the hand, it is clearly within the executive branch, and accountable to the people as such. On the other, it must possess some degree of non-partisan credibility in order to succeed in its mission, particularly if it wants to put people in the other party in jail (for good reasons) without raising the specter that partisan politics is the primary basis for such prosecutions. I don't understand why commentators like Nessuno don't see that. There has be to be a place between "apolitical" and "partisan hack."
Even if there is no formal accountability for the AG outside of elections, we can still criticize (as OK has done) the Justice Department for implementing policies that undermine its own credibility.
Of course it excuses it entire, or affirmative action is revealed to be the utter fraud it is--never a fair chance but by accident, and always a quota in measurable effect.
Yours, TDP, ml, msl, &pfpp
What you saw, if you saw it correctly, is affirmative action in action. Reverse discrimination.
And the excuse is always evening the field, or the results.
Works better when it happens to somebody else.
We need an investigation. Those racist, bigot, homophobes. Why would conservatives and libertarians be "of course" banned from the CRD?
Don't know about law-school graduates, but we interview a lot of new MBAs from first-tier schools each year. And there's a lot of rubbish out there amongst the candidates about what to put on or leave off one's resume to get onto the interview roster. And about what to wear or avoid wearing to the interviews. Etc.
Opaque high-stress environments,such as recruiting at very selective institutions, breed urban myths.
If you have some evidence of bias in the Clinton (or other) administrations, bring it forward. But this is very weak.
Is that "of course" conservatives should be banned from working on Civil Rights?
Or "of course" the "Civil Rights" division was horribly corrupt?
So long as "carrer government" = "biased to the Left", it's not only reasonable, but the right thing to do, for a Republican government to do anything it can to push back.
If the bureaucrats were as honest and honorable as the whiners seem to be claiming, there wouldn't be that ideological bias problem in the first place.
This is not affirmative action - this is good old fashion old boys gaming a selection process - affirmative action remedies past discrimination of particular disadvantaged groups recognized as such in the law. While in conversation it is always easy to bandy about "affirmative action" like this, it is inaccurate and perjorative to equate this with something that is an effort to remedy past discrimination against disadvantaged groups recognized as such in the law.
Best,
Ben
Affirmative action for me but not for thee... I'm guessing it's for the courts - to the exclusion of the political branches - to "recognize" these "disadvantaged groups."
So the question is, is it appropriate for a division such as voting rights to have some attorneys who believe Voter ID laws are ok and some who do not? Or, as evidently many of the career "non-partisan" attorneys felt, is that unacceptable? If career attorneys are leaving for those reasons, do you really think they will give a fair shake to hiring a young conservative attorney who believes constitutional voter id laws are "ok"?
However, I will agree that there is some self-selection here. More liberal law students and a higher percentage of liberal law students interested in government service. It would not surprise me that word got around that DOJ was not as "unfriendly" of a place for conservatives to work later in the administration, resulting in an uptick of conservative applicants.
However, I don't think we should have people who don't "know the law" picked over more qualified candidates. But if their qualifications are equal, then who cares if they ask them what there political leanings are. When Obama gets elected he can have a bunch of libs in the justice department. I think people are just upset over the fact that a harvard grad doesn't get picked before a less qualified candidate.
But the large stink that people are making over this and the Gonzalez firings, is really out of line to me. It's like "oh my god, administrations are choosing staff based on their political leanings!! I've never heard of such blasphemy!!" (sarcasm implied).
Also as a side note, politics in general has became "soft" in this respect. Everybody running around with their "unity 08'" stickers and people talking about "rising above" partisan politics (whatever that means) - its all ridiculous. Polarization is good, as our founders realized. Politics is dirty and nasty, accept it.
For political appointees yes, but this was a civil servant hiring program. Civil servants are there for as long as they want to be, not just the length of the adminstration, most certainly politics shoudl nto come into play.
Prior to the Bush administration, the Civil Rights Division looked for "demonstrated commitment to civil rights" on resumes, defined narrowly as active membership in groups such as the ACLU or NAACP. This had the effect of ensuring that the large majority of its hires leaned left.
Perhaps a colorable policy argument could be made that this should not be the law. But it's beyond question that it is the law. DoJ is bound by it. If DoJ refuses to abide by the rule of law . . .
By the way, I loved the part of the report that described how one of the lead political appointee culprits delayed an interview with OIG, lawyered up, then abruptly quit her job the night before her scheduled interview so she could avoid submitting to an OIG interview. No guilty conscience there!
If it turns out that I didn't get a job one time, even though I was best qualified, because I am Jewish, how does hiring some other guy who's Jewish, who isn't the best qualified, "remedy" that? It's not like all Jewish people are fungible. The only thing it "remedies" is naked numerical tallies, divorced from any claim of desert.
For the obvious reason that discrimination is itself a process which treats people differently according to the group they belong to.
Your entire argument does nothing but rely on the near-impossibility of proving the impact on particular individuals when the wrongful conduct affects everyone in an entire group.
Huh? This is an obvious ideological litmus test. How can this be ok, but it be a grievous illegality when conservatives do it?
In general, there was no problem for liberals during Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton. This administration is the first to really use politics as a major litmus test. Considering what Goodling did, is anyone surprised.
Moreover, using politics for hiring in the civil service is illegal.
I have not "checked the Democrat-Republican membership rolls of top law schools" recently. It has been more than a decade since I was in law school. When I was in law school in the early-to-mid 90s - and I was within the criteria the Report uses here: in a top 20 law school (and not a particularly conservative one), in the top 20% of my class, and on law review - my experience was that there was nowhere near a 5-to-1 ratio of liberals to conservatives.
Now, maybe the ratio of liberals to conservatives has changed in the intervening decade-plus. Or maybe the applicant pool for the Honors Program doesn't mirror the law school population for some unrelated reason. But I doubt it. The careerists at DOJ are left-wing. And they recruit applicants to the Honors Program that are overwhelmingly left-wing (as the statistics show). The real scandal here is that the Report focused on just the political interference by Bush Administration personnel, and not on political interference by the left-wing careerists. But THAT type of scandal will never be seen to be a scandal, because everyone in polite society in Washington assumes that it is A-OK for left-wing careerists to recruit overwhelmingly left-wing applicants.
Defenders of affirmative action always want to change the subject to the noble motives behind their support for affirmative action, rather than actually discussing the process of affirmative action.
But of course wrongful conduct generally doesn't affect everyone in an entire group. It's easy to see how not giving me a job (or not admitting me to a school) affects me. It's not that hard to see how it could affect my children, although that starts to get attenuated. It's very difficult to see how it affects someone completely unrelated to and unaffiliated with me. Particularly when that person wasn't born and his parents weren't even in the U.S. at the time the discrimination happened to me. Particularly when that person is himself not disadvantaged, but privileged.
[*] And by "affirmative action," I mean what that term has come to refer to -- race/gender preferences -- rather than what the phrase originally meant when it was coined, which was non-discrimination.
Maybe four years of the Bush administration?
I think your point number 3 is more important than you suggest. In 1993-95, it was well known that indicating an affiliation with the Federalist Society would not enhance your candidacy with the DoJ. The Clinton-types may have loosened up a bit after the 1994 election, but prior to that they weren't hiring conservative/libertarian types. During this period, my conservative friends usually had two versions of their resumes: one that included items that indicated their political views (usually used for judicial clerkships and certain sympathetic firms like Kirkland) and a sanatized version for everything else, especially the DoJ. This article/investigation is like the Independant Counsel law -- everything is all right as long as liberals are the beneficiaries, but once the policy is applied evenly and used against liberals, then suddenly everything is unfair. Sauce for the goose ....
And playing devil's advocate, at least some of the instances singled out by the report seem legitimate to me. While it's obviously not legitimate to say, "He was a staffer for a Democratic Senator, so reject him," it's not clear to me why "He has a more activist view of what the DoJ should be than we do, so reject him" is wrong.
That having been said, there were too many cases where it seemed pretty clear that decisions were based solely on forbidden partisan criteria.
Unless you believe that either women or certain racial groups are genetically inferior to white males, you would expect them to participate in every area of life in rough proportion to their percentage of the population. Thus the absence of women, blacks, Jews, Hispanics, Slavs, or Irish from a particular school, trade, or profession indicates that the selection process for those schools, trades, or profession is defective. Instead of working on the root causes (which include faulty preparation, discouragement, and lack of interest), or creating a substitute credentialling process, the Congress instituted affirmative action. Affirmative action levels the playing field between the sexes and among the races.
The creation of women's varsity sports is another form of affirmative action, because women's teams cannot compete with men on an equal basis, and they rely on funds drawn from the more popular men's sports.
I think Orin started off with this false equivalency point by reciting impressions of conservative candidates to the Clinton DOJ Honors program that they thought their chances were better if they left off their resume some obvious conservative credential. As Orin appreciates, this is hardly evidence of anything, and is certainly not admissible evidence, so I wonder why he mentions it.
And third, I fail to see how that's responsive to my point. If I'm being unjustly discriminated against in my attempts to enter a particular school, trade, or profession, how does it remedy that for some other person who happens to share my skin color or religious background to get an unearned advantage in entering that particular school, trade, or profession?
No, the motive and the remedy are directly connected.
Sure it does -- that's what it means to discriminate: to treat individuals on the basis of perceived group characteristics. Now, it's true that not every group member will be equally damaged by discrimination, but that's a different issue. Your solution is to say, in practice, that nobody can obtain any remedy. My solution is to give the remedy to everyone in the affected group. Neither is perfect, but mine is, of course, better.
We've been over this before, and I've provided quotes from MLK and LBJ which show that you're wrong as a matter of historical fact.
I don't buy that failing to hire 50% women is proof of sexism so I sure as hell don't buy the idea that less than 50% conservatives is proof of liberal bias. I guess it's "Disparate impact for me but not for thee", huh?
I remember a previous thread where this topic was explicitly brought up for discussion and some "conservative" honestly said (paraphrased): "Hiring preferences for conservatives in academia wouldn't be 'affirmative action' because AA denotes undeserved preferences for unqualified minorities whereas hiring preferences for conservatives in academia would be a fair redress for historic discrimination against them"
Oh boy did that one keep me laughing for a while.
While I can muster no love for the Clinton years, I have to say that I applied for a DOJ Honors position after graduating law school in the late 90's, listed my membership in Fed. Soc. (and position in the law school chapter's leadership) on the application, listed my work for a well known right-leaning circuit court judge, and proceeded to get myself hired. Take from that what you will.
If the Clinton admin or any other failed on this score, it's just as wrong for them. Why do we want to descend into this tit-for-tat mentality, where people race each other to the bottom? "If [insert bad behavior here] was allegedly done by [insert enemy political affiliation here], then why complain when my side does it? Because hopefully, we want to be decent people who hold everyone to the same high standard, that's why.
I also don't understand this 5-to-1 or 2-to-1 comparison. You're talking about the 30% of applicants who actually stated an affiliation. Do you really think the other 70% have none? We just don't know what it is. That numbers game is therefore rather silly.
Have we spoken about this before offline? I know of one person who did this in the Criminal Division around that period; I remember thinking that it was pretty bold to apply with that on the resume.
It doesn't, dude, sorry. But as Mark Field says, those harmed are all members of your ethnic group, not just you. Think of it as akin to (lack of) mootness for claims capable of repetition yet evading review. Should abortion be illegal if the Supreme Court had just waited till Roe went through menopause?
Regarding randomness and lack of interest: If only blacks were surgeons while all Jews were ditchdiggers and pushcart peddlers, would you not suspect something was wrong? Or would you think it was simple preference -- outdoor work is healthy and provides freedom to think about Torah? To me it would at least seem improbable.
Nope. I can't recall ever having met you, chatted with you or exchanged emails on any subject, let alone this one. So I guess there are at least two of us out here who were bold/foolish enough to display our conservative stripes during Honors hiring in the Clinton years.
Seriously, Professor, with all due respect. Re-read your own post. You call what the Bush DOJ does a disgrace but gloss over what was pretty much the same thing going on in the Clinton DOJ, especially the Civil Rights Division as you noted. My guess is that if you did not get the position, you'd have a much different attitude.
There's a difference between "politicization" in the general sense and what is happening here, which is simply not legal. When we excuse bad behavior by always pointing a finger and saying "the other guy did it first", then we can be sure nothing will improve.
Its wrong no matter who does it.
Now try again.
But you do buy that a disproportionate number of "deselections" of liberals is proof of conservative bias? I see.
In any event, as I see it, the disproportionate deselection is not "affirmative action" at all but rather may be viewed merely as correcting the ideological skew in the process induced by the left-wing careerists who weeded out conservatives (or failed to recruit them properly) that lead to the grossly disproportionate 5-to-1 ratio of liberals over conservatives in the first place.
And what's your point? That the 70% whose resumes revealed no ideological preference differed drastically from the 30% who had an ideological marker on their resume? That seems unlikely. If anything, in fact, the 70% who did not reveal anything on their resume would likely be even more liberal than the 30% who did, since we would expect some liberals to hide the fact that they are liberal when applying to the Bush DOJ (just the same as when, as Orin noted above, conservatives hid the fact that they were conservative from the Clinton DOJ).
Re: Conservatives and Libertarians being denied jobs in the Civil Rights area. That is indeed ironic since it was Republicans who voted for and passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Democrats, like Senator Albert Gore, Sr. who voted against it.
erp2, I'm not sure how Albert Gore, Sr.'s vote in 1964 is relevant. But for what it's worth he later said it was his greatest mistake. He also voted in favor of the 1965 Civil Rights Act.
Did you even read the report and are lying or are you just making up "facts" from ignorance?
You are the only one making simplistic "disparate impact" claims. Their evidence goes beyond that.
From the Report:
See, what this means is that they didn't just look at numbers - like you did - but actually talked to people who were involved in the process in order to understand the underlying causes of the numbers. Its an amazing idea. You might want to try it sometime.
We both know that if some liberal said the same thing about 50 conservative applicants you would be all over it. I would be to. The difference between us is that I don't prostitute my integrity for a party like some cheap slut.
Judgement: Pathetic, but please feel free to try again.
The greater part of Republicans, being the more honest, are less inclined to work in government?
Not that the skew in hirin to correct the skew in hires is a bad thing--gotta have diversity, y'know.
Yours, TDP, ml, msl, &pfpp
Driving over 25 mph in a 25 zone is illegal, smoking pot is illegal, and failing to pick up after my dog poops 100% of the time is illegal, too (even 99.9% makes me a scofflaw).
For me, a political branch, whether Democrat, Republican, Green, or whatever behaving politically amounts to about the same as that one time I did not pick up my dog's sh!t. It may be illegal, but...yawn...I'm not outraged. It's all part of the game, baby!
racial discrimination through increased affirmative action
and, while there, [the candidate] helped draft document
arguing that federal law requires recipients of federal
funding to seek actively to discriminate in favor of
minorities (racial, language, and health) rather than merely
to treat all applicants equally; Greenaction is an extreme
organization founded by Greenpeace members and
promoting civil disobedience and engaging in violence in
protests, and the organization adheres to the Principles of
Environmental Justice, which are positively ridiculous (e.g., recognizing ‘our spiritual interdependence to the
sacredness of our Mother Earth’ and ‘oppos[ing] military
occupation, repression and exploitation of lands, peoples
and cultures, and other life forms’); [the candidate] also
is/was a member of Greenpeace; [the candidate’s] essay is
filled with leftist commentary and buzz words like
‘environmental justice’ and ‘social justice.’
I won't speak for all the decisions made (some appear to have been illegal and others were highly questionable as matters of judgment and policy), but the above information is more than sufficient to justifiably remove someone from consideration.
And yet, I've heard some "progrissives" express certainty that AA doesn't and shouldn't make any of it's beneficiaries feel icky.
'Course they're as honest and perceptive as MarkField.
Yours, TDP, ml, msl, &pfpp
If you don't post your e-mail address, how are we supposed to know we aren't sending it to you? :)
I wasn't focused on the spirituality stuff (though as an aside someone too invested in any given ideology, including but not limited to opposing the oppression and exploitation of lands etc., may not be the best choice for employment at DOJ; it seems to me that a key part of the job is setting your personal agenda and policy preferences aside in favor of the evenhanded and fair enforcement of existing laws). I'm concerned with membership in a group that promotes civil disobedience.
While civil disobedience certainly has an important role to play in American society, the moral authority to enforce the law carries with it a heavy obligation to obey the law. You can't put someone in jail for breaking a given law if you yourself pick and choose which laws to obey. In addition, many DOJ lawyers are given broad autonomy with respect to how they prioritize their cases, and it might hurt the credibility of the Department to have someone pursuing a private agenda using his or her DOJ authority.
The DOJ as well as the rest of the liberal elite is pro-affirmative action for protected "minorities," not pro-civil rights for all our citizens.
No, I have no interest in guessing the preferences of people who didn't state one, especially because that's irrelevant. Those who are arguing about this 5-to-1 ratio see it as evidence that liberal candidates had a better chance of getting through an initial screening. I'm saying that when you're talking about 30% of the whole pool, and you have no idea why the other 70% aren't identifiable by political affiliation, then you don't have sufficient evidence to make that argument.
Perhaps the reason why most can't be identified by their politics is not that they are trying to hide for personal advantage, but that they have the decency to try to keep their personal commitments out of an arena where they would be inappropriate. It is a group of the best and brightest, yes? Perhaps they have the basic courtesy to try to keep their politics out of their non-partisan work for the taxpayer, which is what those involved in the hiring process should have been doing, too.
Why? I agree with you. I was calling out the Professor for complaining about this instance but glossing over what is exactly the same thing that was done at the time he got his position. And, I pointed out that this is always done, regardless of who is in power, and that it will always be done. Frankly, I think being shocked that politics is going on here is either something like Claude Raines "shock" in Casablanca or pure denial of political reality.
A fair point, although it doesn't look to me as if McDonald was thinking along these lines.
In addition, many DOJ lawyers are given broad autonomy with respect to how they prioritize their cases, and it might hurt the credibility of the Department to have someone pursuing a private agenda using his or her DOJ authority.
This is also a good point. I'm reluctant to give McDonald a pass on her rejection of the candidate as an ideologue, though. His mere membership in an organization (especially as a youth) isn't persuasive to me that there's a serious risk of him using his power as a junior DOJ employee to pursue a private agenda. Ironically, it appears that McDonald was the one pursuing her own agenda.
A fair point, although it doesn't look to me as if McDonald was thinking along these lines.
In addition, many DOJ lawyers are given broad autonomy with respect to how they prioritize their cases, and it might hurt the credibility of the Department to have someone pursuing a private agenda using his or her DOJ authority.
This is also a good point. I'm reluctant to give McDonald a pass on her rejection of the candidate as an ideologue, though. His mere membership in an organization (especially as a youth) isn't persuasive to me that there's a serious risk of him using his power as a junior DOJ employee to pursue a private agenda. Ironically, it appears that McDonald was the one pursuing her own agenda.
A fair point, although it doesn't look to me as if McDonald was thinking along these lines.
In addition, many DOJ lawyers are given broad autonomy with respect to how they prioritize their cases, and it might hurt the credibility of the Department to have someone pursuing a private agenda using his or her DOJ authority.
This is also a good point. I'm reluctant to give McDonald a pass on her rejection of the candidate as an ideologue, though. His mere membership in an organization (especially as a youth) isn't persuasive to me that there's a serious risk of him using his power as a junior DOJ employee to pursue a private agenda. Ironically, it appears that McDonald was the one pursuing her own agenda.