Wampum

Doing Politics

The Department of Homeland Security recently raised the terror alert level based on information that was between three years and seven months old. Some have questioned the timing of the action, suspecting that perhaps politics had a role in the announcement. MB, who wears no tin foil hat, thinks that the issue is not whether the dog’s tail is wagging but rather why it is wagging.

The Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, was quick to disavow any political motivations:

We don't do politics in the Department of Homeland Security.

Is Ridge right? Does the Homeland Security Department do politics? Let’s look at the short history of the Department of Homeland Security to see if light can be shed on those questions.

After 9/11, a number of leading Democrats, including Joe Lieberman and Bob Graham pushed the establishment of a cabinet level department for homeland security. The Bush administration was adamantly opposed to the creation of such a department preferring instead an Office of Homeland Security without Cabinet level rank, without budgetary resources and without operational control over the diverse govermental agencies charged with elements of security.

When political pressure to create a cabinet level department increased, Bush flip-flopped and endorsed the idea. A dispute arose about the status of the employees of the new department. Democrats wanted employees of the department to have Civil Service protection. The administration wanted to be able to hire and fire Department employees at will.

One of the main purposes of having Federal employees as part of the Civil Service is to prevent the hiring and firing of Federal employees for political or patronage reasons. George W. Bush rejected the notion that the 170,000+ employees of the Department of Homeland Security should be insulated from political pressure. George W. Bush won that battle and all Homeland Security employees can be hired and/or fired for reasons based on politics or patronage.

If the Homeland Security Department is to be off limits to politics, would it not have been better to staff the Department with Civil Service employees insulated from political pressure rather than political and patronage employees?

The next issue was the selection of a Secretary of Homeland Security. If the department was to avoid "doing politics, it would seem that the position should be filled by someone without long political ties to the current administration as well as someone with expertise in security and/or intelligence evaluation. Did President Bush choose such a person to be Secretary of the new department? He did not.

Instead, he chose Tom Ridge. Ridge is a career politician having served 12 years in Congress as well as two terms as the Governor of Pennsylvania. Nothing in his official biography suggests expertise in the area of security or intelligence.

Ridge’s qualifications for the position are mostly political. He was a Bush Pioneer in 2000, having raised more than $250,000 for the campaign.

Ridge was on the short list of Bush’s possible Vice Presidential picks in 2000. In picking a Vice President, Candidate Bush made clear that political loyalty was a prime consideration.

Ridge also worked on the campaign of former President G.H.W. Bush. He has been described as a “good friend” of the current President.

If George W. Bush wanted the Homeland Security Department to be above politics, he could have made a less political appointment for the position of Secretary. Warren Rudman, in independent minded Republican with expertise in Homeland Security and without such close ties to the current President, comes to mind.

It is not just Democrats who were under the impression that George W. Bush’s Homeland Security Department could be used for political purposes. During the fight over Texas redistricting, Tom Delay wanted to locate certain Democratic lawmakers. Delay’s purpose was to have his political opponents arrested and returned to Austin so that a special legislative session devoted to redistricting could obtain a quorum. In order to track down the Killer D’s, Delay turned to the Homeland Security Department, whose employees did in fact turn their attention away from terrorists and rowards locating Democrats.

While it does not appear that Homeland Security understood that it was being used for political purposes in that instance, George W. Bush apparently created the impression in the mind of at least one GOP congressional leader that such use of the Department was acceptable.

If the administration wants the Homeland Security Department to be above suspicion, it should take care not to ask employees of the department to perform political functions. For instance Time magazine reported (the Time article is behind a $ firewall. Fortunately Pandagon was on the case):

Administration sources tell TIME that employees at the Department of Homeland Security have been asked to keep their eyes open for opportunities to pose the President in settings that might highlight the Administration's efforts to make the nation safer. The goal, they are being told, is to provide Bush with one homeland-security photo-op a month.

It is hard to see how telling employees of DHS to keep an eye out for photo ops to help the President’s campaign can be viewed as anything other than “doing politics.”

Finally, if Tom Ridge is going to claim that the Homeland Security Department doesn’t do politics, perhaps he should refrain from doing politics.

As the Rising Hegemon points out, Ridge recently gave a speech in which he said:

But we must understand that the kind of information available to us today is the result of the President's leadership in the war against terror.

That is part of a campaign speech. Ridge also remarked that:

Our job is to identify the threat, match that threat information with the, potentially, the targets that have been identified to integrate an entire country, to build partnerships with the state and local government, to invest in technologies so that as we combat international terrorism we can put more people and technology in place to make ourselves safer.

How does making a pitch for George W. Bush’s reelection promote any of those tasks?

The current administration insisted on a structure that left each and every employee of the Department potentially subject to political pressure. It then appointed as Secretary a person with little expertise in the area but with a long record of political loyalty to the President. The administration then asked employees of the department to scout out good photo ops for the campaign. The Secretary can’t restrain himself from making remarks designed to help in the campaign even though such remarks have nothing to do with the Department’s mandate. Even GOP leaders thought that it was okay to use the Department for nakedly political purposes.

If Caesar’s wife is often seen entering motel rooms with handsome young men, it is likely that tongues will wag. If the administration wants the Department of Homeland Security to be seen as above politics, perhaps it should quit acting like DHS is an arm of the campaign.

Posted by Dwight Meredith at August 4, 2004 05:13 PM | TrackBack