Cronyism Strikes Again

You know, there are times when the charges of cronyism leveled at the Bush Administration are overblown. Then, there are times when they are right. Check this one out...

President Bush yesterday made a raft of controversial recess appointments, including Julie L. Myers to head the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau at the Department of Homeland Security, in a maneuver circumventing the need for approval by the Senate.

Myers, a niece of former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Richard B. Myers and the wife of the chief of staff to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, had been criticized by Republicans and Democrats who charged that she lacked experience in immigration matters.

Myers's nomination faced a bruising and potentially embarrassing fight on the Senate floor, where Democrats were prepared to argue that politics, not merit, drove her selection for an important job preventing terrorists and weapons from entering the country.

The rest of the jobs aren't all that important -- personally, I'm not too concerned if we go several years without an assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration, or if the person at that job is unqualified. But Myers' job is important, and her experience is limited...

As head of ICE, Myers would be in charge of detaining and removing illegal aliens; investigating alien smuggling, illegal arms exports, and money laundering; fining the employers of illegal aliens (well, actually they don’t bother with that any more); plus many, many other responsibilities. She would be the officer chiefly responsible for protecting the nation against terrorist threats once they have succeeded in infiltrating our borders, which are guarded by a different bureaucracy. Her most relevant previous experience was managing only 170 employees and a $25 million budget while at the Commerce department.

Given the importance of the position and a history of mismanagement in the immigration service, Congress took the unusual step of inserting a statutory requirement that nominees have a minimum of five years of experience in both management and law enforcement. Even a cursory reading of her resume reveals that the well-connected 36-year-old attorney’s background fails to comply with this legal requirement; in fact, she meets the bare minimum only by counting her current stint in White House Personnel, where she manages, by her own account, “up to three deputies as well as support staff and interns.”

Myers might even do well in the job. But that's not the point -- like Michael Brown, she's not qualified for the position (although she's easily better qualified than Brown was). And it's not like she was being filibustered (to the best of my knowledge). The fear was that she'd be voted down, on the merits, by both Democrats and Republicans.

If Bill Clinton had done something similar, Republicans would be screaming bloody murder. They should be doing the same thing here.