When a new president takes office he has the right to make sweeping changes. This is particularly true in the Justice Department, where officials all the way down to U.S. attorneys at the state and local level may be replaced. Still, President Clinton seems to be in an uncommon hurry to embark on a wholesale replacement of Republican attorneys.
In recent decades, new administrations have taken up to a year to appoint new U.S. attorneys. Part of the reason is that such appointments simply take time. Another is that incumbent attorneys have been allowed to finish ongoing cases. That only makes sense.Yet among her first acts, new Attorney General Janet Reno asked for the resignations within 10 days of all attorneys appointed by the Reagan and Bush administrations - more than 70 of them.
This unseemly haste has raised eyebrows all over the country, especially since the Justice Department hasn't even finished filling its own upper echelon positions.
The process of finding acceptable leaders has been so slow that there is no deputy attorney general, no solicitor general and no assistant attorneys general to run the department's various divisions.
Not only are top jobs still empty, the administration does not appear ready to begin the recruiting of dozens of potential new U.S. attorneys, run the extensive FBI background checks on each one and submit the names to the U.S. Senate for confirmation.
So why the demand for instant resignations? It's hard to avoid the suspicion that getting rid of the GOP-appointed attorneys may be a cover for ending investigations into high-ranking Democrats. Most often cited is the Justice probe of Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, D-Ill., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, for possible campaign finance irregularities. Rostenkowski is a key figure in getting Clinton's economic package through Congress.
Then there are political corruption cases in California, where a number of officials have been convicted. Democrats have complained they have been unfairly targeted by the Republican U.S. attorneys. Most of those prosecuted have been Democrats.
President Clinton, who has billed himself as a new kind of Democrat, has pledged a Justice Department with a high degree of ethics and one where the law takes precedence over politics. But the haste to make lower-level changes bears an uncomfortable resemblance to old-style politics and patronage.