The President's Prosecutors

U.S. Code TITLE 28 > PART II > CHAPTER 35 > § 541

United States attorneys

(a) The President shall appoint, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, a United States attorney for each judicial district.

(b) Each United States attorney shall be appointed for a term of four years. On the expiration of his term, a United States attorney shall continue to perform the duties of his office until his successor is appointed and qualifies.

(c) Each United States attorney is subject to removal by the President.

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Oh, the irony. Senators Kennedy and Kerry yesterday added their voices to that of Senator Schumer in calling for the resignation of Attorney General Gonzales. One thing they are all upset about is that Mr. Gonzales ousted eight of the 93 U.S. attorneys, perhaps at the suggestion of an aide to President Bush. Now, if Messrs. Kennedy, Kerry, and Schumer want to revise the federal law so that federal prosecutors are like Supreme Court justices, tenured for life and removable only by impeachment, they can try it, though we – and, we'd guess, a lot of others – would oppose such a change, particularly those who still harbor aspirations to be president themselves. For one thing, tenuring prosecutors would put a Democratic president, if there ever is another one, in the unenviable position of being saddled with a team of prosecutors who put traditionally Democratic issues such as prosecuting corporate polluters behind traditionally Republican issues such as cracking down on violent criminals. It would saddle a Democratic president with prosecutors such as William Weld, Rudolph Giuliani, and Michael Chertoff, who are known as Republicans.

Until the law is changed, the senators don't have much of a leg to stand on, in our view. Messrs. Kennedy and Kerry spent the last few years demanding that Mr. Bush fire his defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. Now that Mr. Bush, or his appointee Mr. Gonzales, has exercised the same power of hiring and firing over the prosecutors that Mr. Bush exercised over Mr. Rumsfeld, the Democrats are up in arms. If the president isn't going to be allowed to manage the personnel of the executive branch, we might as well scrap the whole Constitution and let the Justice Department report directly to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Mr. Gonzales yesterday said he regretted the way Congress had been informed of the personnel changes. In the meantime, let the Democrats who had Webster Hubbell and Robert F. Kennedy running the Justice Department criticize the Bush administration for politicizing the Justice Department. It's flare-ups like this that make Americans shake their heads and throw up their hands in dismay at the whole crowd of Washington politicians.