The “Politicization” of the DoJ

Today the Justice Department released a report concluding that Bush loyalists at the DoJ broke the law by allowing “politics” to influence their hiring decisions. The way this ongoing scandal has been reported has often been in the context of “politicization,” of how the administration sought to bring in like-minded yes-men in order to promote executive sovereignty. I think there are two problems with this: (1) I don’t think you can call what the administration did in regards to the DoJ to be “politicization,” properly so-called; and (2) the tacit assumption on behalf of most pundits has been that “politicization” is something that should be condemned.

It’s obvious that the administration’s intent in carrying out this policy has been to allow for them to push through controversial legislation as quickly as possible and with as little debate as possible. Moreover, the administration has used the pretext of an amorphous, all-encompassing threat vis-a-vis the “War on Terror” to legitimize their extra-legal maneuvering. By exploiting shock and then establishing its subsequent lacunae within the juridical order as the norm, the Bush administration has successfully strengthened the power of the executive branch to an unprecedented degree.

What they haven’t done is “politicization” proper. In fact, you could even say they did the opposite: they depoliticized the Justice Department by extricating it from the political domain. By placing it under the subordination of the executive branch, the Bush administration was able to ignore public opinion on issues such as domestic wiretapping, torture, and internment. They’ve justified their actions on the basis of the omnipresent threat of terrorism, which confronted them with a “crisis” that had to be met with “objective” measures. All of this was done under the visage of “security,” “neutrality,” and “objectivity,” just as neoliberalism attempts to paint its fundamentalist market-oriented view as a “science.”

Admittedly, Bush’s tactics have been highly partisan, but that doesn’t mean the same thing as “political.” Perhaps one of the reasons why the word “politicization” continues to be misused is because both parties have allied against it. For conservatives, depoliticization involves the hollowing out of government by replacing all public services with outsourced private sector alternatives, as well as the continued efforts to promote sovereignty over democracy. For liberals, depoliticization involves the discourse of human rights, the reduction of structural violence to atomized incidents, “tolerance” over class struggle and “green capitalism” over deep ecology. Hence, not only is the Bush administration’s so-called “politicization” of the Justice Department in fact depoliticizing, but the very acceptance of the common usage of “politicization” in reference to the incident is a depoliticizing political decision.

—Bryan Klausmeyer