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10/06/2005: Thought for the Day:
Although it's obviously too soon to situate the Bush administration in history, it's possible, as I've suggested before, that it may be leading us into a period where politics is defined according to the old spoils system rather than the technocratic assumptions ushered in by the Progressive Era. This administration has, after all, disdained independent nonpartisan expertise—for example, in belittling the arguments of environmental science and in endorsing the teaching of religious accounts of human origins. It has politicized agencies once prized as nonpolitical, such as the CIA and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It has been unabashed about nepotism and cronyism. In the legal arena, the banishment of the ABA from the judicial selection process represents only the most obvious way that this White House has placed partisan loyalty over disinterested professional authority.
Cumulatively, all of this may well herald cronyism's return to the Supreme Court appointment process. Especially if Harriet Miers is confirmed.
--David Greenberg
Len on 10.06.05 @ 07:17 AM CST
