I have always struggled to understand how it is that the worlds leading democracy has a judiciary that is appointed only at the whim of political interests.
Our system certainly has weaknesses, as the senior judges are regularly criticised for being out of touch with the genreal population, but if our prime minister were to try mass sacking on such a transparent political agenda, he would not last long at all.
At present our judges are selected by incumbant judges, there is a strong move afoot to reform this and effectively have some kind of selection board whose processes are more transparent.
We are not perfect, but good grief, the US takes the whole political thing so far that the judiciary themselves have become politicised, I just dont see how that can be considered a good thing, in fact I think it has some obvious dangers.
Maybe someone can explain the reasoning behind this.
As far as I am concerned, the executive makes the laws, the judiciary operates them, without regard to the politics, and thats is where the accoutability should remain.
casdave, note that the firings are of (Executive Branch) lawyers, not of (Judicial Branch) Justices.
As for appointments: the situation between 2001 and 2006, in which a president was of the same party as an (undivided) majority party in Congress has been extremely rare throughout U.S. history. Generally, even when the president has been of the same party as the party controlling the Senate, there has been enough dissension within that party (which never had a super majority) to ensure that purely political appointments to the judiciary were rare.
Sometimes the system fails, but it has not been in a state of total incompetence for its entire 218 years.
I don’t really have an opinion on this, not knowing the details, but I’m curious as to whether or not you were all this enraged when Clinton fired every single U.S. Attorney except for one - Michael Chertoff. Was that equally bad?
How many U.S. Attorney’s were retained from the previous Democratic administrations when Reagan or Bush the younger took office? Shame about all those Cabinet members who got fired too.
All U.S. presidents have the tradition of replacing all their predecessors’ appointments. Clinton’s was handled oddly because he sent all but one of them packing, first, then went setting their replacements. Typically, the president finds a replacement, fires the current attorney, and immediately nominates the replacement. Clinton’s action was odd in that it placed him in the position of having to scramble to find enough attorneys to get through the nomination process to keep their offices from falling into disarray.
Reagan replaced all Carter’s attorneys. Bush I replaced the majority of Reagan’s attorneys.
Bush II did the same thing, except that he followed the more traditional practice of knocking Clinton’s off one at a time.
The differences in the current situation are that Gonzles is getting rid of Bush appointees who appear to have not followed the party line and that they were replaced after Bush pushed through a change in law that allows him to appoint the attornewys without Senate confirmation.
Chertoff was asked to stay on because he was in the middle of many “high profile” cases, including Sol Wachter, Eddy (Crazy Eddy) Antar, and Arthur and Irene Seale.
That would be tough to do, since I didn’t have an argument to ‘demolish’, and explicitly said I didn’t have an opinion on the matter, since I don’t have the facts. I simply asked a question. He responded with an answer.
But you know, if it gives you the warm fuzzies to think I’ve had my ‘argument’ ‘demolished’, go for it. Who am I to stand in the way of happiness?
Then why demand where the outrage is, if you don’t think there should be some? :rolleyes:
They’re easy enough to find, ya know. Use the Google.
C’mon, Sam, you know as well as us that the firings themselves aren’t what anybody here is “outraged” over; the White House’s attempts to use the attorneys as agents of political harassment is.
Now knock off the robotic talking-point spamming here already, willya? You know by now it doesn’t work, and maybe you even know why. Take responsibility for your posts sometime.
in fairness, dropping the keywords to find out about Clinton firing attorneys into Google is liable to bring up lots and lots of Right-wing (or, at least, anti-Clinton) blogs and news sites expressing horror over the action (with a lot of speculation over his nefarious intent) with rather few references to the U.S. practice of having the attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president and being replaced each change of administration–a point that may not be obvious to a Canadian observer.
so you’re not some “aw-shucks” ingenue who decided to ask a question. You knew that Clinton fired all of the US attorneys, and you knew that Chertoff wasn’t fired. Hell, I didn’t know that from memory. So, I assume you got your information from some blog/site. Your argument was whether “you were all this enraged” about the firing of all US attorneys under Clinton as opposed to the current firing of selected attorneys under Bush.
But, you’re still the smartest conservative on the boards.
Actually, I remembered that Clinton fired all the U.S. attorneys, but I wanted to make sure of my fact before asking the question, so I Googled it. The first hit I looked at said that he fired every one except for Chertoff. So that’s what I posted. I had no idea what the difference was between Clinton’s action and Bush’s, since I didn’t follow the first one very closely, or the second one at all. I even said in my message that I have no opinion on that.
If I need to issue a standard anti-Bush disclaimer to keep people from jumping all over me, here it is: I don’t like Bush. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if these firings were A) done incompetently, and B) the result of some political machinations. That seems par for the course for politicians in general, and the Bush administration in particular.
In addition, my question could easily be turned around against conservatives if that would make you feel all warm and fuzzy. Let me rephrase it to keep everyone’s panties from getting in a bunch: “I’m curious as to whether or not the conservatives who are willing to accept this from Bush were equally tolerant when Clinton fired every single U.S. Attorney except for one?”
Does that make you happy? Can everyone climb down off their high horses now?
Either way you phrase the question, it implies an equivalence between what Clinton did and what Bush has done.
Clinton was following what Presidents have traditionally done–replacing his predecessor’s USA’s with his own. I don’t like that, but there’s nothing sinister about it.
Bush’s recent firings, on the other hand, stink to high heaven.
Depends on how much you really *do * know *before * “looking for the facts”.
There’s no reason even to do a blind search like the one you describe, not unless the *purpose * is to find some way to say “Oh yeah? Well, Clinton did it too!”.
Yet you wondered where the outrage was. :rolleyes:
That’s 3 out of the 486 U.S. attorneys confirmed since 1981.
Those numbers are attributed to the Congressional Research Service, but no one seems to link to an actual report by that organization.
