Red Letter Day

Everything ought to be green on St Patricks day, but it's always a red letter day when Alan Dershowitz says something intelligent - I'm not sure he's even Irish anyway.

The headlines about the Bush administration's decision to fire several United States attorneys, for partisan political reasons, misses the big picture. The politicization of justice is inherent in the structure of the Justice department. In most other democratic and western countries the job performed by our Attorney General--who is the head of the Justice Department--is broken up into two separate and distinctly different jobs.


First there is the Minister of Justice who is a cabinet level politician with no law enforcement powers or responsibilities. His job is to advise the chief executive about policy, politics and partisanship. It is also to keep his boss in office, get him reelected and hurt his political opponents. There is no pretense of non-partisan objectivity in this highly politicized cabinet position.

Second there is the Attorney General, sometimes called the Director of Public Prosecutions whose role is to enforce the law by investigating, charging and prosecuting defendants. That position is an apolitical one, usually held by a professional prosecutor with extensive law enforcement experience and with no accountability to the president or prime minister. In countries with this division of power, there is no need for "Independent Counsel," "special prosecutors" or the like, since the permanent prosecutor is independent.

There are a number of other departments where replacing political hacks with professionals could be useful too.