WASHINGTON EXAMINER: Justice rots from the top.

It is rare for a federal judge to lay into government attorneys this way. Or, rather, it was before President Obama took office. Now it is a lot more common.

Only a month ago, an appellate court judge in the Sixth Circuit similarly excoriated Justice Department attorneys for unethically dragging out the discovery process in another lawsuit, in which they were defending the Internal Revenue Service. In that case, the judge criticized the lawyers’ “studied obstruction,” and repeated use of transparently bogus arguments to drag their feet in the lower courts.

Judge Raymond Ketheledge wrote pointedly that “lawyers in the Department of Justice have a long and storied tradition of defending the nation’s interests and enforcing its laws … in a manner worthy of the Department’s name. The conduct of the IRS’s attorneys in the district court falls outside that tradition.”

There is a pattern here. This incidents are characteristic of an administration willing to make any casuistical arguments to push ideological change that benefits their donors but for which they have secured no public approval or democratic legitimacy.

Well, yes. Also, as my next USA Today column notes, of an administration that is setting a terrible example.

Plus: “Maybe it isn’t so surprising that Justice Department attorneys keep getting caught misbehaving when their boss, the president himself, puts undemocratic change ahead of everything else, including apparently ethical behavior in the practice of law.”