Lawfare‘s Quinta Jurecic comments on the compromises faced by government lawyers and others and ends up with categories, one good, one not so good:
Following Weber, we might define two categories of moral compromise presented by political service: first, compromises that are difficult, painful, and even tragic, but from which one emerges with one’s moral sense and one’s sense of self basically intact. But there are also compromises that are so inherently degrading that there is no coming away from them intact. (Luban makes a similar point in his use of Avishai Margalit’s distinction between “bad compromises” and “rotten compromises.”)
The first kind of compromise is hard, and it’s also inherent in government service. People go into government, after all, because they believe in things, and the bureaucracies they serve in do not always reach, from their points of view, the right answers. Think of the Obama administration officials who believed the President should do more to close Guantanamo or the Bush administration officials who believed sincerely in the tough actions the administration took even as it started to back off of them.
The second kind of compromise, however, is corrupting. This second case is exactly what concerns both Luban and Eliot Cohen, in his Atlantic essay: it’s the result of having lost the keenness of one’s moral sense, in having made the ugly choice to begin with, and it breeds further path-dependencies. Once one has made one degrading compromise, after all, it’s easy to slip toward others. And it also destroys the person’s ability to function as a figure worthy of others’ trust in one’ honorable service and efforts to mitigate harm—which may be the very reason that the official accepted an appointment in the first place. I suspect both the public and those within government will be much more hesitant now to trust Rosenstein and McMaster to serve as guardians of their respective institutions going forward.
And the intuitive psychological responses to your hierarchical superiors has to play into this drama. After all, that’s how we’re built, even if we like to think we’re rational creatures. Quinta’s insights should probably be required reading for any lawyer considering government service – and who prides themselves on their ethical behavior:
I suspect that Rosenstein and McMaster’s behavior has rattled so many of us because it has served as a reminder that the distinction between painful and indefensible compromises can easily become confused, however anguished one feels. More specifically, it suggests that the specific pressures of the Trump administration push in the direction of turning difficult compromises into the sort of compromises that can destroy a person. Jack made a similar point, noting the President’s “mendacity, norm-breaking, and impetuousness,” along with his apparent demands for personal loyalty over integrity and institutional legitimacy. It is entirely possible that a person could go into the Trump administration with open eyes, prepared to make difficult and painful choices for the sake of mitigating harm, and instead be pushed toward degradation.
