A new listing on a federal government job board is raising constitutional questions, as Capitol Police are looking to hire their own prosecutors.
The listing for an attorney position, posted July 29 on USAJobs.gov, says in the description that the employee would “serve as a Special Assistant United States Attorney” in the Capitol Police’s District Offices. The salary is between $145,094 and $186,368 per year.
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Notably, the agency listed for the prosecutor’s job is the Capitol Police, not the Department of Justice. Therein lies the problem, according to Mike Davis, founder of the Article 3 Project.
“It is constitutionally wrong to have prosecutors report to law enforcement. It should be the other way around,” Davis said.
Posing a greater problem, Davis said, is that the leadership of the Capitol Police is a three-person board that includes the House and Senate Sergeants-at-Arms — who are nominated by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
“This is clearly unconstitutional to have federal prosecutors working for Speaker Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in Congress,” Davis said, since prosecution falls under the Executive Branch, not Congress. He also noted how special prosecutors often have a tremendous amount of autonomy.
“They’re going to be able to do whatever the hell they want,” Davis said.
To that end, Davis claimed that these attorneys will essentially be “Pelosi and Schumer’s hand-picked federal prosecutors doing their bidding.” Such an arrangement, he said, where lawmakers have their own prosecutors, “leads to tyranny.”
The whole situation led Davis to raise the question of how this came about in the first place.
“Who signed off on this?” he asked, questioning whether Attorney General Merrick Garland himself approved it.
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