Just good friends

Lexington

Oct 13th 2005
From The Economist print edition

Cronyism is as American as apple pie. But this time George Bush has gone too far

THERE are few things quite as hypocritical as American politicians hurling accusations of cronyism. The Democrats are lambasting George Bush about his weakness for promoting people such as Michael Brown, the horseman turned emergency-agency chief. But does anybody seriously believe that a Democratic president wouldn't appoint cronies of his or her own? And it works the other way as well. The White House is currently defending Harriet Miers as “exceptionally well-suited” for a job on the Supreme Court. But does anybody seriously believe that the Republicans wouldn't have been up in arms if Bill Clinton had tried to put his personal lawyer on the Supreme Court?

All countries have their cronies. That much-cited model of moral rectitude, Tony Blair, is so surrounded by them that they are called “Tony's cronies” (he made his old roommate, Charlie Falconer, Lord Chancellor). Edith Cresson, a European commissioner, appointed her dentist to an advisory position. But you expect that sort of thing in Brussels. America's problem is the contrast between high-minded idealism and low practice.

America regards itself as the world's purest meritocracy—a country based on talent, not patronage and toadyism. A quick glance at history shows this is rubbish. Most presidents surround themselves with a regional mafia: look at Carter's Georgians or Reagan's Californians or Clinton's Arkansans. These mafias produce some rum appointments: Jimmy Carter made his one-time campaign driver, Jody Powell, his press secretary; Bill Clinton made his chum from Miss Marie's kindergarten in Hope, Thomas McLarty, his chief of staff. Scandals are endemic. Harry Truman's Missouri cronies had a weakness for gifts of mink coats and freezers (an issue in the 1952 election). As for the antics of Mr Clinton's Arkansas buddies, the less said the better.
That does not mean every close ally is a “crony”; that term implies incompetence as well as proximity. Condoleezza Rice is no Michael Brown, for example, just as Robert Reich was no Webb Hubbell. All presidents worth their salt bring in heavyweights as well as toadies. Indeed, the trick of running a successful administration—as both FDR and JFK demonstrated—is to balance the competing claims of personal loyalty and individual merit. Mr Bush, as the candidate of the Republican establishment rather than a regional insurrection, brought in plenty of bruisers. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are guilty of many things, but being mere creatures of the president is not one of them.

Still, if the presidential branch doesn't run on cronyism alone it can't run without it. A presidential campaign is a huge gamble. Presidents acquire obligations to people who spend years toiling for them in the wilderness. Not all these people will be from the first division. Presidents also form a peculiar bond of trust with people who served in the campaign trenches with them. Once they are in the White House, the only people they meet are supplicants. So they naturally turn to their old buddies for comfort and advice. Presidents need cronies just as cronies need patrons.

From this perspective the real question about Mr Bush's appointment of Ms Miers is not whether it is cronyism, but whether he has stepped over the line that separates business-as-usual from offensive favouritism. A definitive answer to that question may not be clear for years. But the early signs are that he has overstepped, and done so in a clumsy way.
The reason for this is simple: a seat on the Supreme Court is a very different thing from even the most elevated job in the White House. The court is the summit of the third branch of government and its justices serve for life rather than just at the president's pleasure. Mr Bush is not the first president to nominate a close friend to the court—FDR nominated Felix Frankfurter, who turned out to be a good choice, and Johnson nominated Abe Fortas, who resigned from the bench under a cloud—but both were defensible in terms of intellect and experience.

There is little evidence that Ms Miers passes this test. Conservatives such as George Will say she would not have made anybody's list of the top 100 conservative lawyers in the country. The implication is that even if she turns out to be a conservative fellow-traveller (which they doubt) she won't have the intellectual weight to shape the court. As for the White House's feeble defence of her qualifications, it brings to mind the infamous justification for Richard Nixon's nominee, Harold Carswell: “Even if he is mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they?”

An “obsequious instrument of his pleasure”?

Even more worrying than Ms Miers's intellect is her relationship with the president. As Randy Barnett of Boston University has pointed out, that close bond should be a disqualification for this job. America's system of checks and balances relies on the judiciary being independent from the executive branch. How will Ms Miers be able to rule objectively if she has to deal with a case that reflects badly on Mr Bush?

The one bit of good news in the mess of the Miers nomination is that the Founding Fathers designed the constitution to provide checks on the president's power to advance his cronies. In Federalist 76 Alexander Hamilton justified the consultative role of the Senate on the grounds that it would discourage a president from appointing people who were “personally allied to him” or who were so insignificant and pliable that they would turn into “obsequious instruments of his pleasure”.

The question now is whether the Senate will play its proper constitutional role. Will the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee put the spotlight where it ought to be—on Ms Miers's qualifications and her relationship with the president? Or will they just waste time quizzing her on how she will vote on abortion (which she won't answer anyway)? If ever there was a time for the Senate to rise above the culture wars, it is now.

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