No One Can Serve Two Masters

Career professionals are leaving the Justice Department in droves. They’re finding it impossible both to follow orders and to do the jobs they were hired to do.

Probably without meaning to, the Founders wrote this tension into the Constitution. They vested executive power in one person, the president. Perhaps they didn’t realize how much room for interpretation would lie in carrying out the laws, or how many departments and agencies it would require. Maybe they didn’t foresee how politicized the office was bound to become.

The only limits to presidential discretion were those specified in the Constitution and those Congress wrote into laws. Two years after a disgruntled job seeker assassinated President Garfield in 1881, Congress passed the Civil Service Act to replace political patronage with employment based on merit. The Supreme Court in 1935 affirmed that Congress could limit the president’s authority to fire independent agency heads (a ruling now under dispute).

The Watergate scandal underscored the dilemma of federal attorneys trying to serve two masters. Unwritten norms say the president sets policy and priorities but does not try to influence individual cases. When norms fail, judicial independence goes by the wayside. Legal ethics leave some attorneys little choice but to disobey or resign.

Image: Poster for Growl Theatre, Brisbane, performance of “The Servant of Two Masters” by Carlo Goldoni, 1746.