To the Victor Belongs the Spoils

The phrase "to the victor belongs the spoils" refers to the practice in which the winning party gives its followers government jobs as a reward for working towards victory. The practice is distinguished from awarding offices on the basis of merit. More broadly, this phrase can also refer to policies that benefit one party.

Today, there are reports that
the New Mexico Republican party chairman urder presidential advisor Karl Rove and at least one other member of the White House political team to fire the state's U.S. attorney because of dissatisfaction in part with his failure to indict Democrats in a voter fraud investigation in the battleground election state.

"Anyone with any experience within the Justice Department is completely shocked and appalled by what has been described," said Stanley Hunterton, a former federal prosecutor of 12 years who investigated organized crime in Detroit and Las Vegas. "One of the things the Department has stood for was being apolitical. Sure, politics does gets involved in the appointment process, but this is just nuts."

I cannot say that I'm especially shocked. Hasn't it always been thus, that the party in power will award the plum jobs and advantegous rulings to its political constituency? I think this helps explain the Scooter Libby conviction as well-- that all will be forgiven so long as there is loyalty up.

As Frank Rich notes in today's Sunday New York Times column: "Even by Washington's standards, few debates have been more fatuous or wasted more energy than the frenzied speculation over whether President Bush will or will not pardon Scooter Libby."
Of course he will. A president who tries to void laws he doesn't like by encumbering them with 'signing statements' and who regards the Geneva Conventions as a nonbinding technicality isn't going to start playing by the rules now. His assertion last week that he is 'pretty much going to stay out of' the Libby case is as credible as his pre-election vote of confidence in Donald Rumsfeld. The only real question about the pardon is whether Bush cares enough about his fellow Republicans' political fortunes to delay it until after Election Day 2008."

The main and perhaps the only thing that deters a permanent spoils system is a healthy two-party system. And the prospect that Bush and Cheney will bequeath to a Democratic president and vice president the imperial power that they wrested over eight years must give many Republicans of a traditionalist and liberterian coloration pause. It could very well be that some day President Clinton and Vice President Obama will be writing signing statement, firing attorney generals, and launching preemptive wars.

Ralph Waldo Emerson notes in "Compensation" that there is "no such thing as concealment. Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. You cannot recall the spoken word, you canot wipe out the foot-track. Always some damning circumstance transpires." And the most damning circumstance that will be Bush's legacy may well be a Democratic establishment that embraces and executes the methods and procedures of the Republican establishment, so much so, that, as in the last page of Animal Farm, no one can tell the difference between the humans and the pigs, the Democrats and the Republicans.