 |
| FARDON: U.S. Atty sooner, than later |
Yet
there’s something about the way in which the U.S. attorney’s post for northern
Illinois (as in the Chicago area and Rockford) has been handled that makes me
wonder what the hang-up is.
BECAUSE
THE APPOINTMENT of Zachary Fardon does seem to be dragging along. For people
who want to think that Chicago is a cesspool of corruption and violent
activity, it would seem odd that they wouldn’t consider having a permanent
person in charge of the U.S. attorney’s office to be a high-priority.
For
the record, it was back in May 2012 that former U.S. Attorney Patrick
Fitzgerald let it be known that he intended to leave the post – and as it
turned out, he left the following month.
He
has since moved on with his life – having taken a post with a local law firm
and is currently serving as a member of a panel that is supposed to figure out
how to reform the government agencies that oversee mass transit throughout the
Chicago-area.
For
Fitzgerald, the federal government post he held for 11 years is a past
lifetime.
YET
FOR THOSE people in Chicago who take an interest in the various levels of law
enforcement, we’re still stuck on Fitzgerald as our idea of the ideal “G-man”
because our federal officials can’t just get on with picking a replacement.
Fardon,
a Kansas City native who worked in Nashville before coming to Chicago in 1997
for a stint in the U.S. attorney’s office before going into private practice,
was made public many months ago – going through a process that saw him beat out
a woman who could have been the first ever African-American U.S. attorney in
Chicago.
Yet
our political process that has become hung up on partisan ways of considering
issues such as health care and immigration policy also is capable of letting things
drag on way too long.
 |
| FITZGERALD: Some think he's still U.S. Atty |
If
anything, I wonder if the fact that the ideologues are too obsessed with those
hot-button issues is to blame – they get so hung up on dominating the public
perception on their pet issues that they can’t be bothered to do anything with
the issues that relate to daily governance.
THEN
AGAIN, CONSIDERING that some Republican officials are willing to see a federal
government shut-down to emphasize their opposition to health care reforms
desired by President Barack Obama, maybe they don’t really care that the U.S.
attorney’s office in Chicago has been “leaderless” for the past 15 months.
I
write that sentence knowing full well that there have been people calling the
shots for the federal prosecutors. The Dirksen Building hasn’t come grinding to
a halt just because there’s an empty office where Fitzgerald used to work – and
Fardon likely will someday.
The
key to government agencies at all levels is the fact that there is a certain
bureaucracy that lasts through several political administrations. They are the
ones who keep things moving on a day-to-day basis.
They
are the ones who kept things going on to the point where former alderman and
Cook County Commissioner William Beavers could be found guilty and sentenced to
six months in a federal prison – even though the prosecutor’s office was
leaderless.
STILL,
AN OFFICE gains some sense of direction from its leadership. The Beavers conviction was most likely just past momentum carrying it forward a little while longer -- just as a boat doesn't come to a halt when its motor is turned off.
It
was a sense of direction provided by Fitzgerald that caused the U.S. attorney’s
office in the past decade to be ambitious enough to go after now-former
governors George Ryan and Rod Blagojevich.
I
don’t know how Fardon’s direction, whenever it becomes reality, will compare –
will he try to take a lead on the issue related to Chicago’s murder rate (not a
record high, but still high enough to be depressing to the city’s image)?
Or
is the fact that it took this long before a Senate committee to make a
recommendation, and we’re not sure when a final vote will come about, a part of
our overall problem?
-30-
No comments:
Post a Comment