Call to Battle

From the beginning, President Reagan’s Justice Department has approached law enforcement as if it were a moral crusade. Instead of simply prosecuting wrongdoers or investigating civil-rights violations, the department has unabashedly sought to remake law and to overturn Supreme Court precedents that it dislikes. Stare decisis is not in its vocabulary.

In seven years this Justice Department has campaigned to restore school prayer, to abolish abortion and affirmative action, to secure tax exemptions for private schools that discriminate against blacks and to abandon the exclusionary rule. For the most part the department has failed; in fact, it has run up such a string of defeats that if the law really were a game, these guys would have been benched long ago.

And yet they plunge ahead. Just last week the Baltimore Sun unearthed a memo setting out the Justice Department’s agenda for the last year of Reagan’s term. Entitled “A Strategy for the Remaining Months,” the memo is a remarkable document that urges department officials to “polarize the debate” on key issues. “We must not seek ‘consensus,’ ” the memo argues. “We must confront.”

What this means in practice, the memo says, is that the department should champion compulsory AIDS testing. Obscenity cases shouldn’t bog down in First Amendment considerations. Capital punishment must be enforced for the sake of “deterrence, retribution and incapacitation (i.e., decapitation),” the memo says.

Terry Eastland, the department’s spokesman and the memo’s author, hastily adds that the department is not really urging that anyone’s head be cut off; the word decapitation was used only to make incapacitation “less abstract.” That’s a relief. And while we deplore the department’s insensitivity to individual rights and its zeal to uphold only one view of the Constitution, it’s also a relief to know that this last crusade will probably be no more successful than its predecessors.