More Republicans have broken with Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz Cheney, who is proving to be a polarizer in her own right. In, fact, she’s proving so effective at polarizing that she is polarizing her own party.
But they all must be RINOS:
A group that includes leading conservative lawyers and policy experts, former Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and several senior officials of the last Bush administration is denouncing as “shameful” Republican attacks on lawyers who came to the Obama Justice Department after representing suspected terrorists.
Who can be more of a RINO than Ken Starr? The Politico piece goes on:
Senate Republicans have demanded details of the lawyers’ past work and Liz Cheney’s group “Keep America Safe” has questioned their “values.” A drumbeat of Republican criticism forced the Justice Department reluctantly to identify seven of them last week. But the harshness of the criticism – Keep America Safe labeled a group of them the “Al Qaeda Seven” — has provoked a backlash from across the legal establishment.
“We consider these attacks both unjust to the individuals in question and destructive of any attempt to build lasting mechanisms for counterterrorism adjudications,” wrote the 19 lawyers whose names were attached to the statement as of early Monday.
The statement cited John Adams’s defense of British soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre to argue that “zealous representation of unpopular clients” is an important American tradition.
The attacks on the lawyers “undermine the Justice system more broadly,” they wrote, by “delegitimizing” any system in which accused terrorists have lawyers, whether civilian courts of military tribunals.
The letter’s signers include some of the top officials of a Bush Justice Department that wrestled at length with the legal questions surrounding terrorist detentions.
We’ve noted here the split — a bit swept under the rug by George W. Bush’s recent assertion that he was glad Dick Cheney was out there demonizing as he has been demonizing saying what he’s been saying. But, in fact, a variety of news reports noted that during Bush’s final year he was far less inclined to go along with whatever Cheney proposed and that there was more of a distance between the two men.
But that was on foreign policy issues. This issue highlights a more profound split between these two camps.
And there are larger consquences for the GOP on how it approaches this issue, manufactured by Cheney and her associates. It’s unlikely to play well with independent voters. But GOPers who are speaking out that this is unacceptable will probably find their stock — and the stock of those who they support politically — will go up among some independent voters as a result.
Read our previous post on Liz Cheney HERE.
Now you can follow Joe Gandelman on Twitter.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.