The need to separate politics and state

The idea of the separation of church and state is relatively well understood (if not universally accepted) in North America. The next thing we need to get general agreement on is the separation of politics and state:

In his zest to purge enemies in the government, Richard Nixon was so thorough that he set out to remove a "Jewish cabal" at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. President Bush and his subordinates may match Nixon for paranoia. Some of them lay awake nights wondering how to keep ideologically questionable applicants from infiltrating the Justice Department's summer internship program.

According to the department's inspector general in a report issued this week, they had some success in heading off this potential catastrophe — eliminating many candidates with subversive affiliations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. But the report condemned the effort, finding that it involved official misconduct and broke the law.

The Canadian federal government is a good example of how a bureaucracy can be captured by a political party — especially when that party stays in power for a significant length of time — and how the goals of the bureaucracy become ever more tightly aligned with the goals of the political party currently in power. This is a very good reason for a healthy alternation of parties in government: it counter-acts the natural tendency of the bureaucrats to align themselves with the politicians.

Steve Chapman again:

If you want to know the source of Barack Obama's success, look no further. Republicans think they will win once Americans figure out he's more liberal than he sounds. But Obama's appeal lies less in any supposedly moderate ideology than in his rejection of a corrosive but prevalent view: Government is nothing more than partisan warfare, and may the stronger side win.

The Bush administration thinks every aspect of governance should serve the ends of the Republican Party. Obama says — and may even believe — that some matters should be above politics.

In the case of federal prosecutors, that is not a new view but an old one. U.S. attorneys are political appointees but not, traditionally, political agents. They are supposed to advance justice without fear or favor. To turn them into partisan attack dogs is to make the law merely a weapon of those in power.