A Portrait of Bush's Monica

By Scott Horton

Some months back, I went out to dinner with a former dean of Regent University's law school. He gave me a long account of his battle to get ABA accreditation for his school. “We have Catholic law schools, like Georgetown and Fordham; we have a Jewish law school in Cardozo. What's the matter with having a Christian Evangelical law school like Regent?” he asked. It was hard to argue with that proposition without sounding like a bigot. Moreover, the dean was erudite and charming. Of course, Regent's affiliation with Pat Robertson is not really the issue, though a look at the publications and course syllabus list coming out of the school does raise some questions as to academic standards and rigor. But the dean was pretty quick to acknowledge that his school was not operating at the academic level of the top 20 law schools. “A student who can get into Harvard or Columbia is obviously going to go to Harvard or Columbia. Still, there's room for our special niche,” he said.

The problem is that this “special niche” is squeezing out highly qualified law graduates from great schools around the country for a simple reason: its students are reliably of a certain political flavor, and as for the students of the top 20 schools – who knows? It turns out that George Bush's Monica – Monica Goodling – has been a placement agency for Regent, and an enforcer who fires highly qualified professionals who fail to pass an ideological litmus test.

Dahlia Lithwick has an excellent portrait of Monica Goodling and the rise of Regent Law School up at Slate. It's an amazing compilation of information, including Monica's law school website, on which we learn that Monica considers CNN to be a “voice of the left,” spent a year abroad in France in which the focus was on food (the most redeeming part of the site, actually), and doesn't know how to spell or author a grammatical sentence. Dahlia describes the essence of her Washington career in these terms:

Goodling's chief claim to professional fame appears to have been loyalty to the president and to the process of reshaping the Justice Department in his image (and thus, His image). A former career official there told the Washington Post that Goodling “forced many very talented, career people out of main Justice so she could replace them with junior people that were either loyal to the administration or would score her some points.”

In Germany in the thirties, this was called Gleichschaltung – the process of weeding out independent thinkers and replacing them with those who were ideologically engaged and committed. Incidentally, among the targets of the Monica purges were a number of U.S. attorneys, potentially including the U.S. attorney in Minneapolis. Monica's good friend Rachel Paulose, who was installed in her place, has brought the office there to a meltdown, as the senior staff resigned en masse. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports that Monica was to have been a special guest at Paulose's installation ceremony, dubbed a “coronation” in the local media, but cancelled out in the last minute – as she was apparently being counseled to take the fifth.

Monica considers herself to be a committed and politically engaged Christian. Among other things, that manifested itself in shilling for the administration in connection with the use of torture on detainees in the war on terror. Monica worked for then-Deputy Solicitor General Paul Clement when, in 2004, he falsely told the Supreme Court that the United States does not use torture. She fielded calls to his office demanding that he explain his misstatements with a simple “no comment.”

Dahlia concludes her piece by reminding us of a bit of Scripture that Monica seems to have missed in Bible school. Psalm 146: “Put no trust in princes, in mere mortals in whom there is no help.”

Over at the Boston Globe, Charlie Savage looks at the same issues and come up with a similar analysis.