Right now, the focus on the White House's purge of the US Attorneys has been on the sleazy manner in which the firings were handled, and the possibility that it may lead to the cashiering of Attorney General Alfredo Gonzalez. The firings are coming to symbolize the brazen abuse of power by this Administration, and the unchecked arrogance that characterized the first six years of Bush's tenure in office.

But even more important may be the long-term ramifications this scandal will have on the Republican Party. You see, US Attorneys not only serve a very important role within the bureaucracy of the Justice Department, they also hold a very key position in the pipeline for future stars in the judiciary and in the political system. Each of the people who were fired were Republican stalwarts, attorneys who had proven their partisan bona fides in the past. These were lawyers who were being groomed for bigger and better things.

And now, these same people are being told that this Administration, the same cabal that wouldn't fire Rumsfeld or Rice or the numbskulls around Cheney, no matter how stupid or incompetent they were, was using "job performance" as the excuse to terminate their careers at Justice. It isn't just humiliating; it's needlessly insulting, and it's being done to the best and brightest in the Republican Party, the men and women who were going to be the future Cabinet secretaries, federal court judges, and elected officeholders for the GOP. And the people who have the ignomonious distinction of replacing them will hold tainted positions, and accrue none of the benefits of the position. For a party that has been atrophying at its lower ranks the past few years, this scandal is akin to a major league baseball team seeing its farm system wiped out in a plane crash.