MICHAEL GREVE ON GANGSTER GOVERNMENT AT THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT:

In a saner day and age a judge might simply have reported the lawyers to their DoJ superiors. They’d be fired; and if you get fired by Ted Olson or someone with an equally refined, near-obsessive sense of propriety, you might not work again any time soon, at least not as a lawyer. Alternatively or additionally, a judge might have sanctioned the attorneys and referred them to their state bar.

What this order is meant to signal, and what in fact it says, is that we no longer have that kind of DoJ. The lawyers in this case didn’t freelance; they were ordered to lie as part of a plan to create facts on the ground before some ornery judge could obsess over legal technicalities. And Judge Hanen pointedly cites and discusses other recent cases in which appellate courts complained of and cracked down on comparable DoJ misconduct. For what it’s worth this is consistent with what I hear, with increasing frequency, from my friends in the appellate bar: you can no longer trust government attorneys to play it straight.

Well, yes. That’s what happens after 8 years of “by any means necessary” governance, while the press turns a blind eye. Which is why the Executive Branch needs to be controlled by a white male Republican. For accountability.