The “Politicization” of the DoJ

Today the Justice Department released a report concluding that Bush loyalists at the DoJ broke the law by allowing “politics” to influence their hiring decisions. The way this ongoing scandal has been reported has often been in the context of “politicization,” of how the administration sought to bring in like-minded yes-men in order to promote executive sovereignty. I think there are two problems with this: (1) I don’t think you can call what the administration did in regards to the DoJ to be “politicization,” properly so-called; and (2) the tacit assumption on behalf of most pundits has been that “politicization” is something that should be condemned.

It’s obvious that the administration’s intent in carrying out this policy has been to allow for them to push through controversial legislation as quickly as possible and with as little debate as possible. Moreover, the administration has used the pretext of an amorphous, all-encompassing threat vis-a-vis the “War on Terror” to legitimize their extra-legal maneuvering. By exploiting shock and then establishing its subsequent lacunae within the juridical order as the norm, the Bush administration has successfully strengthened the power of the executive branch to an unprecedented degree.

What they haven’t done is “politicization” proper. In fact, you could even say they did the opposite: they depoliticized the Justice Department by extricating it from the political domain. By placing it under the subordination of the executive branch, the Bush administration was able to ignore public opinion on issues such as domestic…

# posted by Bryan  tags: class struggle, corporatism, Department of Justice, depoliticization, George W. Bush, neoliberalism, politicization, sovereignty, the shock doctrine, the state of exception, U.S. Politics