In Washington, we’re hearing rumblings that the Right may be looking to start a fight over Attorney General nominee Eric Holder, whose confirmation hearing will be in early January. It’s tough to imagine the kind of audacity it would take to challenge Holder’s nomination after Attorneys General Ashcroft and Gonzales.

After eight years of being dominated by politicization, cronyism and extremism, the Department of Justice is in desperate need of a good housecleaning. The Department, like the Attorney General, is supposed to defend the rule of law and Americans’ constitutional rights. But under the Bush administration, the DOJ has been used as a weapon against constitutional values, used to fight the administration’s ideological and political battles.

In the wake of 9/11, John Ashcroft’s Justice Department led the Bush administration’s relentless assault on civil liberties. The DOJ was on the forefront of the draconian expansion of surveillance and police powers, and contributed heavily to post-9/11 era of extreme government secrecy. Career lawyers at the DOJ were subtly — and not so subtly — pushed out in favor of attorneys more politically and ideologically aligned with the administration. The Civil Rights Division was completely politicized and instead of using its resources to protect voters’ rights (by enforcing the Voting Rights Act among other things), the DOJ waged an attack on voting rights by supporting disenfranchising policies like Georgia’s restrictive voter ID law. The Department also exploited the ‘widespread voter fraud’ myth for politically motivated witch hunts — part of a larger trend of selectively targeting political and ideological opponents for investigation and prosecution.

And how can we forget the Gonzales era at the DOJ! The Attorney General is supposed to be the people’s lawyer, but Gonzales was more the president’s bag man. The problems that existed under Ashcroft continued or got worse. As more and more news came out about the NSA’s illegal warrantless spying on Americans, the torture of U.S. detainees, legally questionable military tribunals and other subversions of the rule of law, we found out that the DOJ had expressly signed off on these administration policies and in some cases even supplied the legal and intellectual underpinning out of the Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). And when a scandal broke over the firing of U.S. attorneys, it became clear exactly how politically motivated hiring and firing practices had been at the DOJ, which evidently was staffed with a disproportionate number of graduates of Pat Robertson’s law school (including one of the people tasked with the hiring/firing)!

Attorney General Mukasey has been arguably better than his two predecessors, but following the records of Ashcroft and Gonzales, that’s not very hard. Eric Holder is a stellar choice: smart, capable and able to lead the DOJ in a new direction. But he will have his work cut out for him and he’ll need help from people like you and me. First, we need to make sure he’s confirmed, and that could mean a campaign to defeat whatever attacks right-wing senators throw at him. Then, because of the politically skewed hiring practices, he’s going to need the support of the people to make dramatic changes at one of the government’s most important agencies.

For eight years, the Department of Justice — a government agency with a rich history of enforcing civil rights and the rule of law — has served the worst ideological and partisan impulses of the Bush administration. The era of overzealous ideologues and partisans like Ashcroft and Gonzales is coming to an end.

Thank goodness.

But now it’s time to dig in our heels and do our part to put the justice back in the Department of Justice. I hope you don’t mind if I call on you for help in the coming months.