And oddly enough, it appears to largely be Republicans firing Republicans for investigating fellow Republicans…

6 of 7 Dismissed U.S. Attorneys Had Positive Job Evaluations (emphasis added)

All but one of the U.S. attorneys recently fired by the Justice Department had positive job reviews before they were dismissed, but many ran into political trouble with Washington over issues ranging from immigration to the death penalty, according to prosecutors, congressional aides and others familiar with the cases. Two months after the firings first began to make waves on Capitol Hill, it has also become clear that most of the prosecutors were overseeing significant public-corruption investigations at the time they were asked to leave. Four of the probes target Republican politicians or their supporters, prosecutors and other officials said.

Now, leave off the question of whether the firings had political motivation. At the very least, one must ask, when considering these sorts of actions, “what will the motivation for these actions look like?” In this case, it looks like these are prosecutors who were getting positive performance reviews, but they started looking under the wrong skirts, and got slapped down for it.

Normally, I might not get too upset over this. After all, when you’re in the world of politics, you have to expect that your friends will stab you in the back if it means another point in the polls for them. That’s how politicians operate, and that’s been the rule of the game ever since we transitioned from the divine right of kings to choosing rulers at the ballot box. But given our current administration’s desire to assume their own sort of divine rights, I see that this is merely a continuation of the same pattern we’ve seen the last six years. The money quote:

“There always have traditionally been tensions between main Justice and U.S. attorneys in the districts,” said Carl W. Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond. “But it does seem like there’s an effort to centralize authority in Washington more than there has been in the past and in prior administrations.”

If you wonder what the effects of centralized power will end up being, look no further than to a quote from Ronald Reagan: “Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.” This only puts in sharper relief the extent to which the conservative movement has abandoned the cause of liberty in the last two decades.