Justice Department De-Politicizes Intern Process

This is just great news. According to the Washington Post:

The Justice Department is removing political appointees from the hiring process for rookie lawyers and summer interns, amid allegations that the Bush administration had rigged the programs in favor of candidates with connections to conservative or Republican groups, according to documents and officials.

Of course, this is a problem unique to "the Bush administration." God knows that, in prior Administrations, no such "rigging" occurred.

Or, at least, the "rigging" going on before was designed to favor those with powerful political connections, rather than the competent.

It seems that incredibly suspicious activities were engaged in by these Conservative ideologues hired by the Bush Administration. Imagine (with appropriate breathlessness, if you can) that one member of a four-person team dared to suggest that the other three were wrong about a Georgia law that was later struck down. God knows, there are never good-faith disputes in the law, like the four Supreme Court justices who disagreed on the recent partial-birth abortion decision. And then there's this example:

Another honors hire, a graduate of the University of Kentucky College of Law who had been president of the campus chapter of [a national organization], displayed a bust of President James Madison in his Justice office, according to a former honors program lawyer who was hired during the Clinton administration.

Leave it to a Clintonista to find suspicious a law student's display of a bust of the man who was the Father of the Constitution. And whose silhouette also happens to appear on the logo of EEEEEVIL! Federalist Society.

I applied for one of these internships in 1987, after my first year of law school. Didn't get it. To be sure, my credentials weren't steller (well above middlin', but not stellar). Who did? A guy by the name of John F. Kennedy, Jr. (now, recently deceased), well known for his stellar intellectual credentials.

A guy who failed the Bar exam three times before passing it.

I suspect that the main complaint here isn't that the Justice Department wasn't running the program based on merit, but that a Republican Administration had merely dared to discriminate against those with powerful, far-Left connections. Apparently, the WaPo found it not at all questionable that one former honors program lawyer hired during the Clinton Administration commented that "When I started, it was rare you met people whose civil rights credentials were that they were part of the Federalist Society, but it became a commonplace thing," even though the Federalist Society has more than 30,000 members.

Perhaps the WaPo's real complaint is that the Justice Department and its Civil Rights Division is no longer discriminating against Conservatives.