In the earliest months of the Bush Administration, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft began routinely overruling federal prosecutors' sentencing recommendations, forcing on US Attorneys unprecedented numbers of death sentences. From that moment it should have been clear that this White House views these attorneys not as law-enforcement professionals but as the partisan muscle for its entwined political and policy ambitions.

Now, after the abrupt firing in December of eight US Attorneys, it stands revealed that officials at the highest levels of the Republican Party and the White House have routinely sought to strong-arm prosecutors in the most politically sensitive law-enforcement matters. In Seattle US Attorney John McKay lost his job after rebuffing a thoroughly improper request by Representative Doc Hastings, former chair of the House Ethics Committee (!), to intervene in Washington's gubernatorial recount. In New Mexico US Attorney David Iglesias lost his job for refusing to speed up investigations of Democrats in time for the fall elections. Karl Rove, it turns out, routinely acted as the GOP's messenger, conveying to the Justice Department the displeasure of political operatives with individual US Attorneys. And the President himself, according to press reports confirmed by the White House, explicitly sought the removal of US Attorneys deemed insufficiently enthusiastic about pursuing vote-fraud cases against Democrats.

The stakes in the Gonzales Eight scandal are far more profound than the hiring and firing of a few prosecutors. It is by now a shopworn cliché of the Bush Administration to say that the Constitution itself is at stake. But what other assessment is possible? Each of the Gonzales Eight--to a person, competent and admired prosecutors--lost a job because the President, Rove and other GOP bosses sought to warp fundamental American institutions, including elections, criminal investigations and sentencing, for political gain. That is the very essence of corruption.

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