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Old August 19th, 2008 #28
Mike Parker
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Join Date: Jul 2007
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Anyone who wonders why this is important should sometime look up the backgrounds of presidential appointees and other political appointees in the executive branch. They are at the subcabinet level in the cabinet departments (such as assistant secretary and deputy assistant secretary), and in similar posts in regulatory agencies. These are the people who really make public policy, by channeling information up to the better-known higher-ups, by framing the major alternatives (and disregarding any others), and by directly making all sorts of lesser decisions that can add up to major impact. One example is the role of the Jew Douglas Feith in making the case for the Iraq war, but this goes on in all agencies. These people are especially powerful in the regulatory agencies, which are subject to very limited oversight by any other branch of government.

You’ll find that a huge share of these political appointees are lawyers, most from the brand name law schools featured in this thread (Feith went to #14 Georgetown, following #1 Harvard College). That is true even excluding specifically legal positions such as at the Department of Justice and the General Counsel of other agencies. That is, most of these lawyers are not practicing law, they are deciding the substance of public policy. It may seem strange, in that there are people who seem to have more relevant credentials to do that, such as degrees in public policy itself, and in all sorts of technical fields related to specific policies. Those people are of course in government, more commonly as civil servants. But more often than not they work for politically-appointed lawyers, and carry out those lawyers’ wishes.

I’m not sure why this is, and it isn’t as typical in Europe. It may just be that lawyers’ facility with words (quibbling) helps them to sell dubious policies to others like themselves (such as Congressmen, also mostly lawyers) and to the media. It may also be that the big D.C. law firms are convenient, lucrative places to be when out of office. Whatever the case, these lawyers are immensely powerful, and who’s indoctrinated them and to believe what should be of interest to the rest of us.