Norm!

Remember how mad Republicans were when Bill Clinton almost banned military uniforms from the White House grounds? [*] Soldiers have always appeared in unfirom at the White House, they cried. This disrespects our traditions. Well that, says Jeffrey Rosen at tnr, is exactly what the current Washington scandal is all about -- only the stakes are much higher.

Presidents have always been allowed to fire their prosecutors midterm. They just didn't. And the result of this longstanding tradition, or "norm" was prosecutoral independence, professionalism, and the guarantee that the US As would worry about the law and not politics.

Now the Bush has gutted the tradition and fired two US Attorney Generals for political** and not performance-related issues the norm has been violated to the detriment of us all. As TNR has said:

...once a president destroys an old norm, it isn't very easy to restore it. The next presidents, even high-minded ones, will have difficulty denying themselves the political advantages accrued by Bush. The history of reform, not to mention the annals of cultural anthropology, is filled with cautionary tales about the near-impossibility of restoring old standards. For example, every time a candidate or political party discovers a new loophole in the campaign finance laws--soft money, 527s--every other candidate quickly embraces the very same reform-skirting device.

[*] In fact, no such ban was ever considered. Like so many things the RW tell us, this was a lie.

[**]Bushies: Dont even try to argue:

(1) Carol Lam was the U.S. attorney in San Diego, and responsible for investigating powerful republicans who collaborated with former Representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham, who resigned from Congress in 2005 after pleading guilty to accepting more than $2 million in bribes from defense contractors. On May 10, 2006, Lam notified the Department of Justice that she was planning to seek search warrants for the home and CIA office of Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, who had resigned two days earlier as the number-three official at the agency under a cloud of Cunningham-related suspicion. The following day, Sampson sent an e-mail to the White House: "The real problem we have right now with Carol Lam ... leads me to conclude that we should have someone ready to be nominated on 11/18, the day her 4-year term expires." What was the real problem? The fact that she was investigating Republicans, I bet. [Most of the preceeding paragraph is from here]

(2) David Iglesias was fired (according to the AG) for being insufficiently enthusiastic in his prosecution of alleged voter fraud committed by New Mexico Democrats. According to Iglesias in a recent New York Times op-ed, he received phone calls just before the November 2006 elections from Representative Heather Wilson and Senator Pete Domenici. Both asked whether he was planning to bring corruption charges against local Democrats before the election, and, when he said no, Domenici responded, "I'm very sorry to hear that." Soon after Wilson's call, Iglesias's name was added to Sampson's list of U.S. attorneys who were asked to resign. Iglesias convincingly argues that he took voter fraud allegations seriously. But, after he reviewed 100 allegations of voter fraud, he concluded that only one case warranted federal prosecution. Iglesias (in other words) believes he was fired for not bringing charges in a case he considered without merit--that he was, in other words, "fired for not being political."
[Almost all of the preceeding paragraph is from here]