Dems' bad faith on US Attorney firings will backfire

John Podhoretz:

IN pursuit of a short-term political benefit, Democrats are in danger of establishing a ruinous new standard in American politics - one they'll come to regret and rue when they take the White House again.

They're contending, in effect, that the president and his staff should not have untrammeled authority to fire political appointees.

By inflating the dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys into a major political scandal with the suggestion that the act of dismissing them is a scandal demanding congressional oversight, they're creating a new political reality.

The American people - or whatever fragment of them is paying attention to the matter - surely now thinks that the president had no right to fire these attorneys and that he probably acted in an illegitimate way by doing so.

The longer this goes on, the easier it will be for pseudoscandals to be ginned up in the future whenever a certain type of official working in the executive branch is removed from his job.

That's just wrong - as a matter of law, of policy and of the proper functioning of our constitutional system.

...

But the president does not have unlimited authority to hire all political appointees. About 500 of them must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. But while the Senate must approve their hiring, according to the Constitution, it is granted no role whatever in overseeing their removal from the positions they hold.

The president is the manager of the executive branch. Indeed, as a matter of constitutional law, he is the executive branch and is therefore co-equal to the other two branches.

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Democrats, primarily in the Senate, have been engaged in an energetic effort to turn the dismissals of eight of those United States attorneys into a massive political scandal.

It isn't and shouldn't be. Democrats have every reason to protect the prerogatives of the executive branch because one of their number will occupy it again soon enough.

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The problem I see with Podhoretz's analysis is that Democrats do hypocrisy so well. When this issue comes up in a Democrat administration they will do what Henry Waxman did in the much more egregious case of the travel office firings where trumped up criminal charges were added to the mix. They will say "so what."

When your political attacks are based on bad faith like this particular attack by masters of bad faith politics like Chuck Shumer and Pat Leahy don't expect them to bat an eye when the tables are turned. They will ignore the heat and do what they want to do, which is what President Bush should do.