Column: Not A Shock DOJ Internship Nixed Students With Left-leaning Ties
This story was written by Andrew Roush, Daily Texan
On June 24, the Department of Justice released a report confirming allegations of politicized hirings in two Justice Department internship programs. The 115-page report from the Office of the Inspector General and the Office of Professional Responsibility outlines the denial of applicants to sought-after positions in the department's Honors Program and Summer Law Intern Program based on political leanings.
The findings come more than a year after the Washington Post reported that political appointees would be removed from the selection process of the programs after complaints to Congress from within the Justice Department, and vindicates years of speculation during the tenure of former Attorneys General Alberto Gonzales and John Ashcroft. The report concludes that applicants were denied interviews based on affiliation with individuals and organizations considered Democratic or left-leaning.
Among the organizations blacklisted by government agencies are three Austin-based groups: the Save our Springs Alliance, the Texas Civil Rights Project and the Political Asylum Project of Austin. It's another chapter in the tainted story of the Bush administration's Justice Department, and one that hurts the promising lawyers of our community and reflects poorly on this administration. After the row over politicized firings of seven U.S. Attorneys in 2006, this is a crime the department can hardly brush off.
If it weren't for such scandalous pettiness in the past, this newest mess might take us by surprise. But this isn't a narrative unique to the Justice Department. In his book "Imperial Life in the Emerald City," journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran relates a similarly depressing process in the selection of officials in the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, where State Department officials were bumped from important positions based on political leanings and bureaucratic turf wars that reached all the way up to Vice President Dick Cheney.
What makes this whole affair so unpalatable is not who is being precluded, but rather how they are being precluded -- based on politics, which is illegal, according to the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act. Laws like that are in place to protect one of the most fundamental pieces of our national character -- individual opportunity. The American system is supposed to be based on fairness, personal responsibility and individual merit, traits that are important to all citizens.
We're deceiving ourselves by thinking that these values are always ingrained in our government -- they're not. It's a particular outrage when bush-league politics dictate our next generation of leaders by playing favorites and secretly hindering local programs.
The department notes on its Web site that the selection for their internship program is "based on many elements of a candidate's background including academic achievement, law review or moot court experience, legal aid and clinical experience and summer or part-time legal employment." If this report serves its purpose, we'll see that process returned, and more broadly, we'll see individual opportunity re-enshrined in our government.