When the next administration is sworn in, January 2029, they are going to have some major challenges. Every time you read about another career prosecutor leaving the DoJ over some prosecution they refuse to file, it’s another person that put their agency and their profession above politics. Everyone that stays, and is willing to file those charges, is someone who caves. It’s likely that a number of senior people being promoted, who will promote other people underneath them, at best put their career above their ethics. At worst, they put their politics above their ethics. Perhaps so much so that they will undermine a Democrat administration.

Some of these folks will see the writing on the wall and will leave to start a podcast, “telling all” about the failed Democrat justice department. And with no sense of irony, will talk about how they were pushed toward political prosecutions. They will join a long line of other former federal law enforcement that quit to specially crap on Democrats. That’s nothing new. I would be surprised if the bulk of federal law enforcement didn’t lean Republican. And they’re not above the tribal fighting that the current administration is promoting. What’s happening is the ones who may vote Republican, but put their professional ethics and their agency above politics, are being pushed out. The saving grace, if there is one, is craven people are usually less competent.

But what does the next administration do? Does it start to go through the agencies, with a wire brush, making it clear they want the nakedly partisan people gone? Pam Bondi and Cash Patel will be gone the moment a Democrat president’s hand comes off the bible, January 2029. There will be, and should be, no discussion of keeping those unqualified political hacks in place one minute longer than necessary. Along with many of their deputies and assistants, who would normally be held over into a new administration, at least for a time. I don’t think it will take long for them to see that some people are the result of four years of intentionally injecting politics into prosecutions. And those people have to go.

In a sentence, the next administration will be accused of exactly what this administration is doing. Even if their goal is to simply get rid of the lackeys and hacks.

In the same way the Supreme Court is giving the administration a free hand on even long stand precedent regarding independent agencies, they will try to curtail the new administration. If the Democrat fires commissioners at the FCC, for example, I’m sure they’ll suddenly rediscover the error of their previous decisions. And I’m sure when it comes to suits by civil servants being pushed out because they are brazenly political, they will be horrified that a Democrat would politicize the justice department.

I have no illusions about the Federal Courts any more. I think they mostly follow the law, and some cases depend on how you see the world in interpreting the law, but the result of the Trump appointments (and the failure of Obama and then Biden to fill those appointments) is a more political judiciary. One that will impede the return back to a professional, ethical Federal law enforcement bureaucracy.