It’s naive to think that political considerations have no informal influence in governmental hiring, particularly to sensitive posts like the administration of federal justice. But the lengths to which Bushco will go and the blatancy with wihich they blithely ignore due process to do it still beggar belief.
And is it just me or are these Bush Barbies all of a cookie-cutter type? Dana Perino and Mionica Goodling – clones of the ur-beneficiary of the looks=competence+decency myth, Ann Coulter? I think we should be told.
You know how it is, as does Bushco – people think better looking individuals are more competent and women are less corrupt, so to cover high crimes, appoint good-looking, photogenic women to commit them. Simple.
But the looks are just a sideshow – we should focus on what these willing tools do, not how they look. That’s playing their game.
From Legal Times, via TPM Muckraker:
Few people in El Paso know more about immigration law than Guadalupe Gonzalez, a lawyer who has prosecuted illegal immigration cases along the Texas border for nearly 25 years. In 2002, after seeing an advertisement, she applied — and was passed over — for an opening on the local bench of one of the nation’s 54 immigration courts. But when two more vacancies arose in 2004, nobody bothered to tell Gonzalez. In fact, the positions were never advertised.
Instead, the Justice Department’s leadership, which oversees the immigration courts, used a little-known power to appoint two lower-level attorneys — both of whom Gonzalez had supervised at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in El Paso — to the $115,000-a-year positions.
The authority used to bypass the competitive hiring process would be employed again and again during the last year of Attorney General John Ashcroft’s tenure and continue when Alberto Gonzales succeeded him in 2005. And according to the immigration court’s former administrator, it also allowed top political aides at Justice, including former Gonzales chief of staff D. Kyle Sampson and former White House liaison Monica Goodling, to fast-track candidates of their choosing — including a number of lawyers with no immigration law experience but strong ties to the Republican Party or President George W. Bush’s election campaigns.
[…]
Though allegations that Goodling had politicized the hiring of federal criminal prosecutors were known by the time she testified, her admission that she had taken political considerations into account in the hiring of immigration judges — who are considered civil-service employees — was not. Nor was it well-known that a discrimination suit filed by Guadalupe Gonzalez led to internal debate within the Justice Department over the appointment process and to a hiring freeze of immigration judges that began in December — a freeze that wasn’t lifted until last month. Justice’s immigration judge selection process is currently being probed by the department’s inspector general and its Office of Professional Responsibility for potential violations of federal civil service laws.
Gonzalez’s story illustrates the inconsistent methods used to fill immigration judge positions. As with the replacement of U.S. attorneys, political appointees at the Justice Department appear to have trod upon department norms — and may have even broken federal law — to reward their own people with plum assignments.
Go read the whole thing: the Us attorney scandal and now the immigration courts are not siolated inciodents of polital corruption. Bush minions like Goodling and Paulose and their buddy in Rove’s office Kyle Sampson are like termites – you don’t know they’re there until it’s too late and the damage is done. You might spot one or two but you won’t know the extent of the infestation until the whole edifice collapses into a pile of dust.
