Even if we haven't had the evidence to prove it, we have known for a long time that George W. Bush believed that the power of the federal government should be put to the task of not only instituting a radically conservative agenda but also strengthening the Republican Party. Yet with the river flow of information surrounding the prosecutor purge scandal and improprieties in the Department of Justice under both John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales has come the basis for a fairly strong case that President Bush has blatantly and perhaps even illegally misused the tools at his disposal for partisan political reasons.

I need not delve too deeply into the prosecutor purge scandal, which I have written about on this site almost daily for the last several weeks and which other sites like TPM Muckraker have been covering even longer and in greater depth, but I will take a moment to point out to you a few related stories that have emerged in recent days. Yesterday, Lara Jakes Jordan of the Associated Press demolished the administration's assertion that the majority of the United States Attorneys fired in 2006 were let go as a result of their poor performance; in fact, six of the eight were among the top third of USAs in terms of prosecutions and five of the eight were among those with the largest number of convictions. Today, we were also offered further proof that the scandal not only reached those fired for partisan reasons but also into those who were maintained in their present positions because of their fealty to Republicans allied with the Bush administration as The Hill's Mike Soraghan detailed the plum plea agreement given to a staffer to former GOP Sen. Ben "Nighthorse" Campbell who was caught up in a kickback scam and as TPMm's Paul Kiel reported that sloppy work by federal prosecutors has led to a reversal of the conviction of GOP strategist James Tobin for attempting to fix the 2002 New Hampshire Senate election.

Yet the improrpieties within the DoJ under the Bush administration have been far from limited to just the prosecutor purge scandal. As Carol D. Leonnig reported yesterday in The Washington Post, there are now serious allegations from within the DoJ that the senior leadership of the agency applied undue political pressure on the lead attorney in the landmark lawsuit against the tobacco industry, which has long been supportive of Republican politics. Considering the time, money and energy put into the case -- not to mention the countless Americans who have died as a result of the deceptive practices of the tobacco industry -- it is unconscionable and nearly unthinkable that an administration would allow politics to stymie DoJ lawyers just as the suit was nearing the point of fruition.

While it is certainly expected that an administration would infuse politics into its decision-making process and even consider partisan ramifications at any turn, the degree to which the Bush administration has relied on partisan politics to make decisions and to which it has partisanized the levers of the federal government is truly unprecedented. Although it is possible that individually each of these actions has been legal (or at least some of them), there is no question that President Bush has taken his actions to the boundary of what is legal in a way that no president, perhaps even including Richard Nixon, has done before. And sadly, we are all, Republicans and Democrats alike, worse off as a result.