Daily Iowan

Issue date: 3/27/07 Section: Opinions

So what's with the big brouhaha over the firing of some U.S. attorneys? I mean, they're just lawyers, right?

And we all know how we feel about lawyers, right? (Insert your favorite shark/professional-courtesy joke here.)

If the truth be told (and some days, even these days, it is), we all know how we feel about lawyers until the day we need one.

And actually, in the interest of truth be told, etc., I have to admit that some of my good friends are lawyers. And one of my brothers is a lawyer.

So, given that I may be biased (who, me?), I tend to think that lawyers are good, honest people trying to do a difficult job, while daily being forced to use a foreign language.

I mean, have you ever tried to read a legal brief or court opinion? I don't know what language they're written in, but it ain't English.

(Which brings up an interesting point about so-called English-only laws, which I feel are about as necessary as laws requiring people to breathe. But if you're going to have English-only laws, it should be a requirement that they be written in English, so that you don't need a lawyer to translate them into English for you.

(Actually, whenever I hear of some meathead proposing an English-only law, my first impulse is to start speaking French. Which is dangerous, because my French is accompanied by several heavy layers of rust and, French people tell me, a quite strong German accent. That's OK, I tell the French; every German I've met [and that's a fair number, given that I lived in Berlin and was married to a German] tells me my German is accompanied by a quite strong French accent. Thank god I never tried to learn Chinese.)

Meanwhile, back at the fired U.S. attorneys (they're in here somewhere; let's see, Iraq casualty figures, more Iraq casualty figures, why is the mainstream media again dumping on Al Gore?, NCAA Tournament picks, Tom Tancredo's aide saying liberals are 100 percent enemies of America [wouldn't he be better off in the Gestapo?], a recipe for kimchi I've been meaning to try, oh, here they are, underneath some old lawyer jokes).

So what is the big deal about firing some U.S. attorneys? Don't they, in the phrase we've now heard 700 million times, serve at the pleasure of the president?

Well, first off, I would never associate either one of the two presidents we have with pleasure.

I can think of some other words, though - in English, French, and German.

And it's true, Bill Clinton did replace all 93 of the U.S. attorneys at the beginning of his term. For that matter, Bush replaced most of them at the beginning of his term.

Which brings up an interesting point: The eight fired prosecutors were all Bush's people. If he thought they were incompetent, why did he appoint them?

Well, of course, the incompetency allegation has pretty much been debunked; at least seven of the eight fired attorneys received good competency reports.

So it must have been something else. And the word "politics" pops immediately to mind.

But these are political positions, you say. And the president gets to have his choices.

Well, yes. And no. As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo (which first broke the story of the firings, in December 2006) writes, "What we seem to see are repeated cases in which U.S. attorneys were fired for not pursuing bogus prosecutions of persons of the opposite party."

This particularly seems to be the case in the firings of David Iglesias of New Mexico and John McKay of Washington state. They seemingly were removed because Republicans believed they weren't prosecuting Democrats for voter fraud.

And that's a perversion of the justice system. You can have people you believe to be your allies as U.S. attorneys, but you cannot use the legal system to target your political opponents.

I mean, that smacks of the bad old days of the Soviet Union.

And we don't want to go there. I mean, what was the point of winning the Cold War if we become the Soviet Union?

Besides, I can't imagine how bad my accent would be in Russian.

Beau Elliot doesn't always want to speak French when he hears of English-only laws. Some days, he just wants to say, Scheisskopf.

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