appointing attorneys
Joe Conason’s article at Slate about “Albert Gonzales’s Coup d’Etat” discusses the administration’s partisan antics with the appointment of US attorneys. Conason traces the problem to:
December 2005, when the Senate renewed the Patriot Act. At the behest of the Justice Department, an aide to Sen. Arlen Specter slipped a provision into the bill that permitted the White House to place its own appointees in vacant U.S. attorney positions permanently and without Senate confirmation.
How (un)surprising: the Bush administration promulgating its “unitary executive” theory at the expense of the separation of powers.