Ah, remember the days when there was a line not to cross?

Where this could be a facetious joke rather than a far reaching neo con plan that permeated every administrative office?


Crossing a line at Justice



How an attorney general handles outside political forces is critical to the mission of true justice. Alberto Gonzales could have learned a thing or two from one of his Justice Department predecessors: RFK.
By Ronald Goldfarb

The current agonies of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales call to mind a dramatic moment in the Robert F. Kennedy Justice Department. Members of his organized crime section were in RFK's office reviewing our pending investigations and cases. One of our group advised Kennedy that his grand jury investigations were about to lead to the indictment of the then-mayor of a large Midwestern city, one that had voted for his brother John Kennedy in the close presidential election of 1960.


When my colleague completed his report about the big scalp about to be added to our list of political corruption cases, RFK was quiet. It happened that the scalp in question belonged to President Kennedy's ambassador-designate to Greece. The attorney general smiled slightly and facetiously remarked: "Well, that's nice. Now my brother's going to have to put me on the Supreme Court." The indictment went forward and included others in the city's political (Democratic) machine. All were convicted.

That anecdote is relevant today as the Senate Judiciary Committee considers the attorney general's recent dismissals of several U.S. attorneys. When it comes to the proper administration of justice in the Department of Justice, there are politics and there are politics.

The two P's

Capital "P" politics that is, party politics, such as the partisan personal shenanigans of Gonzales meddling with the independence of competent prosecutors' discretion in response to political pressures are improper and have no place in the justice system. Small "p" politics, the imposition of discretionary preferences, policies and priorities in the focus of prosecutorial discretion, generally are proper. Partisans must accept them, like it or not. They are not the basis for replacing attorneys general.

http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2007/05/crossing_a_line.html