are attorney generals usually controversial, or is it just that i've

[UpsideDownFlag]

grown up only being aware of Reno and Ashcroft? it seems that they're always hated by about the other side for various reasons (reno=waco, for instance, or Ashcroft= patriot act/TOA). has this always been the case?

[baldguy]

1. What;s wrong with Janet Reno?

One person was responsable for the deaths at Waco - DAVID KORESH!

[UpsideDownFlag]

3. i know, my point was....is it just something that comes with the territory

[teryang]

2. The systemic problem of religion and law

Those who accept fundamentalism rather than the Constitution as the basic vantage point for adjudication of the law are the problem. Many of these people regard the Bible and the loose and nebulous system of beliefs they associate with it a more important source of "law" than the Constitution and our our centuries old traditions of common law jurisprudence.

I've met quite a few lawyers in this category. It isn't the law and legal process that should dominate consideration of policy and decision making in the judicial branch, but statements referencing "personal responsibility," "accepting the consequences of one's actions" and "the official policy of the police." These attorneys operate on a superficial level of simplistic beliefs in the ultimate moral authority of......authority. How about assistant AG Dinh, the author of the Patriot Act and Patriot Act II? Is such an attorney upholding his oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States? It was distressing to observe the ABA listening quietly and respectfully during the rantings of this deranged lawyer. It is equally distressing as a government attorney in the federal government to be asked to pray at the office on their knees by their boss or to "witness," or to do any of the other "in group" inscrutable rituals of the not so new holy roller ring knockers of the right. Failure to comply is at the risk of your career.

Well researched, reasoned and authoritative legal authority is reduced to meaningless irrelevance as observed in the Coup 2000 decision of SCOTUS. We see law professors and Appellate Court nominees who advocate the legality of torture and gulag like executive policies. It's all a matter of faith. The problem is the same one that the age of reason and the founding fathers sought to rid us of more than two centuries ago. Religion is cynically manipulated by those who seek power by non-Constitutional means.

[MichiganVote]

4. When, in the case of Ashcroft, even a dead guy beats him

in an election, and your supremely partisan and stupid President appoints him to a very high office---people with any brains tend to think the guy is just a little toooo blessed. Not to mention Ashcroft is not just any asshole, he is an asshole with power.

[DivinBreuvage]

5. Wilson had an Ashcroftian AG waaay back in the 1910s: A. Mitchell Palmer

"Attorney-General A. Mitchell Palmer.... generalized his own experience into a national emergency. Looking back at the situation a year later, he swelled to his theme: 'Like a prairie-fire, the blaze of revolution was sweeping over every American institution of law and order a year ago. It was eating its way into the homes of the American workman, its sharp tongues of revolutionary heat were licking the altars of churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes, seeking to replace marriage vows with libertine laws, burning up the foundations of society.'

On New Year's Day 1920, the Attorney-General ordered simultaneous raids on radical centers throughout the country. Palmer's agents captured over 6000 individuals, but only three revolvers and no dynamite at all.... Yet his alarming noises did succeed in spreading a contagion of fear. In Hartford, Connecticut, for example, visitors at the jail inquiring after friends caught in the raid were themselves arrested on the ground that this solicitude was prima facie evidence of Bolshevik affiliation.... At one cabinet meeting, early in 1920, the President, trembling and ghostlike, turned to his Attorney-General. 'Palmer,' he said, 'do not let this country see red.' "

From The Crisis of the Old Order by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.