We often forget that the government of this country was run in a highly partisan manner until the early- to mid-twentieth century. Given the US attorney scandal, new disclosures of partisan activities at the General Services Administration, and this Los Angeles Times op-ed from Joseph D. Rich, a career attorney at DOJ (among other things), it seems like we may be returning to that approach. Here's how Rich opens the piece:
The scandal unfolding around the firing of eight U.S. attorneys compels the conclusion that the Bush administration has rewarded loyalty over all else. A destructive pattern of partisan political actions at the Justice Department started long before this incident, however, as those of us who worked in its civil rights division can attest.
I spent more than 35 years in the department enforcing federal civil rights laws — particularly voting rights. Before leaving in 2005, I worked for attorneys general with dramatically different political philosophies — from John Mitchell to Ed Meese to Janet Reno. Regardless of the administration, the political appointees had respect for the experience and judgment of longtime civil servants.
Under the Bush administration, however, all that changed. Over the last six years, this Justice Department has ignored the advice of its staff and skewed aspects of law enforcement in ways that clearly were intended to influence the outcome of elections.
Rich's experience mirrors that of career experts and administrators across the federal government. This White House has ignored, suppressed, and overruled dissenting views across the government to a greater extent than any recent administration (see also The Republican War on Science). Politics, it seems, always comes first.
Can the federal government recover? It's not clear. If we look at the trajectory of civil service reform since the end of Reconstruction, we see that the Pendleton Act, which eventually helped create the professional civil service, was passed during a period of high partisanship, but the Hatch Act, which limited partisan activities by government employees, was not passed until party polarization had declined dramatically:
With party polarization reaching levels not seen since the late 19th century, it's not hard to imagine that the style of federal governance will slide back toward previous norms.
[Note: To compute my rough measure of party polarization, I calculate the distance between the median members of the two parties in DW-NOMINATE for the House and Senate and average those values.]
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