Judge finds Bill Essayli unlawfully serving as top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles

Bill Essayli's defenders say this is a technicality. A technicality is a comma splice in a statute. What a federal judge found here is that the Trump administration took a job the Constitution says requires Senate confirmation, ran out the legal clock on holding it by other means, and then relabeled the arrangement so nobody would notice.

The law gave Essayli 120 days as an interim U.S. attorney. When that expired, he was named "first assistant," and his duties were later shuffled on paper. Judge J. Michael Seabright, a George W. Bush appointee, looked past the labels and found a de facto U.S. attorney serving beyond the limit. Courts are supposed to ask what a person is actually doing, not what the org chart says. If a title swap can defeat a statutory time limit, the limit means nothing.

The strongest argument on the other side deserves a real answer. It runs like this: the president runs the executive branch, the Vacancies Act is clumsy, Senate confirmation has become a partisan hostage-taking exercise, and no administration should have its prosecutors held up by senators. That has force in the abstract. But Congress chose the rule, and the Senate's role is the point, not a bug. If confirmation is too slow, the remedy is to nominate people who can be confirmed, or to get Congress to change the law. The remedy is not to treat the statute as a suggestion. Essayli says the president and attorney general can pick whomever they like. If that were true, the 120-day limit and the confirmation requirement would be dead letters, and the administration would not have bothered with the first-assistant maneuver at all.

This is also not an isolated stunt. Similar fights have played out over Alina Habba in New Jersey, Sigal Chattah in Nevada, and Lindsey Halligan in Virginia, where the Comey and Letitia James prosecutions fell apart over her appointment. This is a pattern: install loyalists in the most powerful prosecutorial posts without the vetting that confirmation demands, and dare the courts to stop it.

Why loyalty over vetting? Because of what these offices are being used for. In Los Angeles, Essayli's office has been at the center of the federal response to protests against immigration raids. Prosecutors there have faced criticism for aggressive charges, and for cases that collapsed or never survived scrutiny. Nobody should be surprised that a prosecutor who owes his job to one man and never had to answer to the Senate behaves like that man's instrument. Confirmation is imperfect, but it forces a nominee to say publicly what kind of prosecutor he intends to be. Skipping it is the whole attraction.

The human stakes are concrete. Defendants in the nation's most populous federal district are prosecuted by an office whose leader a court has now said is unlawfully in charge. Every indictment, plea and charging decision made under his supervision invites a challenge. That is not a win for anyone who wants real accountability for real crime. If the administration cared about convictions that stick, it would have sent a confirmable nominee.

Note, too, the stay request. Essayli says he expects the Supreme Court to decide, which is a polite way of saying he intends to keep the job while the clock runs. Delay is the strategy. A ruling that does not take effect immediately lets an unlawful arrangement keep operating until the fight is exhausted.

Democrats are not blameless either. If we want courts to enforce these limits, we must be willing to demand the same discipline from our own presidents, and to insist on it when it costs us. But the principle is simple. Prosecutors hold the power to take people's liberty. In a republic, that power flows through law, not through a clever memo. Seabright saw that. The Supreme Court should, too.