One Step Closer for Mukasey
And there we have it: Michael Mukasey was recommended to the full Senate this morning by the Judiciary Committee, on an 11 to 8 vote, with Senators Schumer and Feinstein (as expected) tipping the scales in the AG-to-be’s favor.
MSNBC does an excellent job recapping and expanding on the basics, here and here, including the widely held assumption that the full Senate will follow the Committee’s lead and Mr. Mukasey will become this nation’s next Attorney General.
Like Shaun Mullen and many others, I was not supportive of Mukasey’s nomination after he hedged on waterboarding. Later, Holly’s post, on Schumer’s and Feinstein’s rationale for supporting Mukasey, forced me to re-think two key questions.
(1) Which is more important: the prospective AG’s unwavering clarity on this single-but-important issue, or gaining the benefit of what many believe will be his (otherwise) exceedingly competent and generally apolitical leadership at the helm of the DOJ?
(2) Is it all together Mukasey’s responsibility to clarify the waterboarding debate, or does Congress share some of that responsibility via new legislation, mandating (unequivocally, once-and-for-all) that this appalling practice is indeed torture and will not be allowed at the hands of any U.S. agency or person?
The conclusion I reached is perhaps best articulated by regular TMV commenter Domajot, who attached these thoughts to Holly’s aforementioned post re: Schumer’s and Feinstein’s decision …
[Their] reasoning is sound, but it’s a sad day for the US nevertheless.
It’s a sad day when the nation’s AG-to be can’t say what he thinks about waterboarding.
It’s a sad day when our heroes are people who had to settle for a questionable choice instead of a good choice.
I accept, but I do not celebtate.
Photo Credit: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
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10 Responses to “One Step Closer for Mukasey”
“It’s a sad day when our heroes are people who had to settle for a questionable choice instead of a good choice.”
Not to be a total downer, but that is always the case.
Sam — perhaps. But if it makes you or Domajot or anyone else feel better about Mukasey’s likely confirmation, consider the following from the joint statement issued last week by Sens. McCain and Graham:
I read that to indicate at least this much: The waterboarding question survives the nomination, and whether he answers now or later, Mukasey will eventually have to be very clear on the issue. And then we will know just how helpful or heroic, harmful or horrible his confirmation was.
We wiill have to see whether ‘all agencies of the government’ also include the CIA. THe MCA covers only the military, as I understand it.
There is also the interest in protecting from culpabality those who have participated in waterboarding and other acts of torture in the past.
We have a long way to go before final clarity, I think.
I don’t expect Congress to be able to do much while Bush still holds the veto pen, BTW.
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Well, the Dems should know better by now than to go too far left, to be politically cheap, to be simply obstructionist, or to approach the hysteria about this issue that we’ve seen elsewhere.
Actually, he doesn’t have to be clear, if he doesn’t want to, and some Democrats may well have done some thinking for a change, and decided this fact can be exploited. These Dems may not only be realistic about their own behavior but clever about Mukasey’s; if they don’t block his assumption of office (just gripe a bit about his evasiveness), and he continues to be evasive, that continues to make him and the Bush administration and Republicans overall look bad (or at least it can be “spun” that way) between now and November 2008. In other words, having someone evasive like that assume a highly visible position would be a potential gift to the Democrats, so some are moved to take it.
DLS — That’s remarkably cynical but potentially accurate. I hadn’t even thought of that angle, though it wouldn’t surprise me if you were spot on.
Plus, he’s not the torturers or one of the bosses.
Well, the Dems should know better by now than to go too far left, to be politically cheap, to be simply obstructionist, or to approach the hysteria about this issue that we’ve seen elsewhere.
Yes because the question of whether the United States continues to engage in torture is purely an issue of the left.
Honesty, if you’d told me 6 years ago that we’d be arguing over whether the AG should be capable of publicly acknowledging that a known torture technique is illegal, I’d have thought you were crazy.
I certainly never considered the pro-torture position to be a Republican one.
Senators Schumer and Feinstein and the 9 Republicans who joined them simply reaffirmed that our current Congress is pathetic and incapable of asserting even the most basic moral principals of our society.
The United States should not torture and the Attorney General shouldn’t need the Congress to spell out for him every conceivable method that violates the law.
Any of you who think he’ll be more forthcoming now that he’s passed the single test where the Congress could hold him accountable are living in a very strange world.
We have from DLS an exercise in reading the Democrats’ minds, once again. As that kind of thing can’t be proved or disproved, it’s often just a reflection of how an observer’s own mind works.
In this case, it matters not one iota what the Dems might or might not be xchemeing. There is an up front valid argument for doing what they did, and it’s sound. We can support it on that basis without going into convolutions of speculation, that can never be anything but that – speculation.
In the meantime, there are decisions to be made.
They’re either good, or they’re not..
You’re overreacting, to say the least, as you would be were you to disparage criticism of Congress’s foreign-policy-related blunder about the Armenian genocide and relations with Turkey currently.
I’ve made a reasonable guess concerning not necessarily why Schumer and Feinstein have relented on the guy’s evasiveness, but how such a decision could benefit the Democrats between now and a year from now. What so many of my critics on here routinely fail to do, that I do, they need to do: think.
Why would two often-liberal Democrats, willing to be as antagonistic toward the Bush administration as the administration can be toward Congress, let the guy off so easily? There must be an advantage (to the Democrats) potentially in doing this to justify the decision.