Jamie Saul: My badge of honor: 'Deselected' by Bush's Justice Department
Jamie Saul
June 27, 2008
On Tuesday, the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Justice
released a scathing report describing how members of the department's
hiring committee illegally excluded candidates with perceived liberal
leanings from the highly competitive Honors Attorney and Summer Law
Internship Programs. Given what we know about the history of the
Bush administration's manipulations within the DOJ -- from the ongoing
U.S. attorney firing scandal to allegations of politically motivated
investigations and prosecutions -- this news hardly comes as a
surprise. I find it hard these days to find much that the
administration does shocking. The report found that during the
2006 selection process, a three-member screening committee (two of whom
were political appointees) engaged in a pattern of discrimination based
on the candidates' perceived ideological and political views. As a
result, the committee "deselected" a staggering 31 percent of the
qualified candidates put forward by various divisions within the
department. The most disturbing portions of the report come from
the inspector general's interview with Esther McDonald, a young
political appointee to the staff of acting Associate Attorney General
William Mercer, who served on the 2006 screening committee. (An
interesting aside: McDonald was initially hired by none other than
Monica Goodling, the disgraced political hack who played a key role in
the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.) The report includes quotes
from an e-mail sent by McDonald to the other members of the screening
committee in which she lambastes candidates who have worked for
"leftist" organizations seeking to promote social justice or
environmental protection. For instance, she derides the Poverty and
Race Research Action Council as an organization that "actively works to
extend racial discrimination through increased affirmative action (by
arguing that) federal law requires recipients of federal funding to
seek actively to discriminate in favor of minorities (racial, language,
and health) rather than merely to treat all applicants equally." She
asserts in the same e-mail that the "Principles of Environmental
Justice (are) positively ridiculous" because they seek to oppose
"military occupation, repression and exploitation of lands, peoples and
cultures, and other life forms." McDonald actively "deselected" highly
qualified candidates whenever she found the application to be "filled
with leftist commentary and buzz words like 'environmental justice' and
'social justice.' " As someone whose ideology and career embrace
a commitment to the apparently "leftist" agenda of social and
environmental justice, I find these comments horribly offensive. What's
more, this kind of political screening clearly violates DOJ hiring
policy as well as the Civil Service Reform Act, which requires
selection of federal employees based on "relative ability, knowledge,
and skills, after fair and open competition which assures that all
receive equal opportunity." That law also prohibits federal agencies
from making hiring decisions based on political affiliation or ideology. But
my visceral reaction to the news was compounded when I realized that I
was one of the candidates "deselected" for political reasons in 2006.
The report quotes my application essay, in which I expressed my desire
to "serve as part of the team charged with enforcing the world's most
comprehensive environmental laws, and with defending the crucial work
of our environmental and resource management agencies." Apparently that
quote, and my law school experience working for the environmental
organizations Northwest Environmental Defense Center and Earthjustice,
suggested to the screening committee that I had an agenda -- not "an
open mind as to the best way to enforce ... environmental laws." I
have been advised by friends in the legal field to wear this rejection
"like a badge of honor," and that's what I intend to do. It's
reassuring to know that my views on environmental protection don't
quite line up with those of this administration's policymakers (that's
an understatement), and now I find myself working at the wonderful
Midwest Environmental Advocates in Madison. Here at MEA, I'm free to
pursue my "radical leftist agenda" of environmental justice,
unconstrained by the absurd power of a political appointee with hardly
more legal experience than I have. Congress will surely merge
this controversy into its ongoing investigation of shenanigans within
the Department of Justice, and the report has drawn the attention of
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy. We can only hope
that some changes will result. That change must also come this November
at the voting booth, where we have the crucial opportunity to restore
integrity to the federal government. Jamie
Saul is a staff attorney at Midwest Environmental Advocates and a 2007
graduate of Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore. The opinions
expressed in this article are entirely his own.
|