Loyalty Test
"Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
—George Washington
Leonard Lopate had a guest on today who described the State Department’s and the Defense Department’s treatment of its own whistle-blowers. The details were deeply disturbing: at least one had to be placed under the witness program; another very nearly found asylum in Canada, which had just (accurately) placed the US on its list of nations that practice torture. According to the guest, Rumsfeld himself “outed” a dissenter to his staff, singling him out for vindictive treatment. As something of a break, Lopate then had a novelist on, but the next story after that described a lawsuit in which NASA employees are being subjected to inappropriate and unjustified background checks, quite possibly in retaliation for recognizing the considerable evidence for global warming, against the wishes of the current administration.
These cases are fairly spectacular for their proximity to high-level executives, and for the fact that they are directed at people—high-level officers and scientists—who should be above politicization of objective fact, but they are hardly unique in our culture. Political cronyism is nothing new in US government, but for decades the Republican party has waged a massive and largely successful campaign to replace dedicated professionals with party loyalists. They have done so passively, by appointing no one but party loyalists, and aggressively, by destroying the careers of those who were not party loyalists, or simply dismissing them without cause.
Remember the federal prosecutors fired for prosecuting Republican politicians? Remember Valerie Plame’s exposure for her husband’s criticism of White House policy? Remember how Colin Powell was ejected and replaced by Condaleezza Rice, when he stopped pretending the WMDs were surely to be found in Iraq any minute? Remember how Christine Whitman was dismissed for thinking the Environmental Protection Agency was meant to protect the environment? These are big, public cases, but it’s been happening all the way down the line, too, right down to Illinois DMV employees who refused to swear a loyalty oath, and it’s been happening for twenty years or more.
I think I’m finally reaching Eileene, who has inherited a firm law-and-order mentality from her parents, convincing her that the innocent do indeed have something to fear when authorities are permitted unnecessary access to personal information. Careers are ruined, reputations smeared, incomes withheld, embarrassing or even dangerous secrets exposed when some brave soul decides to do the right thing instead of simply following orders he knows to be wrong. Ethics obviously don’t protect whistle-blowers; if those in power had reliable ethics, we wouldn’t need whistle-blowing.
Sadly, even the law cannot be counted upon. Most cases never make it to court. Evidence hidden behind a wall of silence, or a security clearance, or a presidential pardon for anyone who takes the fall, is no evidence at all, as far as the courts are concerned; witness the difficulty we see today in establishing accountability for blanket warrantless wiretaps of the nation’s phone systems, and the Supreme Court's increasing willigness to dispense with the Fourth Amendment. Of those that make it to court, most are dismissed, as the Rasul v. Myers case I reported last week. Of those that are tried and secure a conviction, we cannot be sure that the sentence will be executed; just ask Scooter Libby. If, by some miracle, justice is done to executives who intimidate their underlings into toeing a party-political line, it’s too little, too late, too rarely, to do any good for the victims. Even if the bastards fry, the intimidation techniques continue to do their work: whistle-blowers know they will be made to suffer for doing right. We haven’t seen anything else since Nixon.
These are gross abuses of authority, and deeply harmful to our country. Loyalty oaths were a blight on our country in the Red Scare, and they are a blight today. When the many, many government employees we rely on are held accountable to the politics of the ruling party, and the party aggressively fights to make them unaccountable to anything else, government has ceased to be a dangerous servant and has instead become a fearful master.