It’s not just federal agency leadership positions that have gone unfilled in the Barack Obama administration. Via ProPublica, the Houston Chronicle’s Mary Flood reports that of the 93 U.S. Attorney positions just 1/3 are filled. This is important because it is up to these prosecutors to investigate complicated cases like corporate crime. In 2009, a growing number of federal prosecutions were the low-hanging fruit of prosecuting immigrants who illegally entered the country.  Incredibly, despite a year of national pressure on government to get to the bottom of the financial meltdown, corporate fraud and securities fraud prosecutions were down in 2009.

Can we blame the U.S. Senate for the dearth of federal prosecutors like we can blame them for the death of federal agency leadership? Sort of. Flood reports on what’s going on in Texas:

What usually happens is that the senior U.S. senator in the president’s party suggests a name to the White House. The nominees need Senate approval and by tradition — not by law — a home-state senator can block confirmation.

In Texas and some other Southern states with no Democratic senators, the leading congressional members were supposed to pick. But that riled Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn.

“That produced a stalemate,” Flood writes, where Obama and Texas Democrats have suggested people that Hutchison and Cornyn don’t like and Hutchison and Cornyn have suggested people that Obama and Texas Democrats don’t like. What would be nice — if yes, a little quaint — is if Obama nominated a prosecutor and the Senate gave the nominee a yes-no floor vote. But in Texas and elsewhere, we haven’t even got the nomination stage.

The other culprit besides the politics of today is the politics of 2007. Google “U.S. Attorney” and the first page of results yields Talking Points Memo “U.S. Attorney Purge Timeline,” which details the politically motivated dismissal of nine U.S. Attorneys by the George W. Bush administration. Then-Justice Dept. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales allegedly fired many of these federal prosecutors because they didn’t do what Karl Rove wanted. So Obama and AG Eric Holder are trying to nominate the federal prosecutors they want, while also being clear that these prosecutors will be independent of the White House. It’s not sensational, but the absence of federal prosecutors under Obama could become as much a crisis of good governance as the dismissed federal prosecutors under Bush.

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