Mukasey finally gets some intelligent questions
President Bush’s nominee for Attorney General Michael Mukasey is getting some thoughtful questions. I’m not sure that we are going to like his answers. Senator Leahy and Senator Whitehouse have asked questions about torture and Executive Power. Mukasey’s answers have been less than heart warming.
I’m thinking that if you can’t agree that waterboarding is torture then, you shouldn’t be confirmed. He is just stonewalling. We can’t have that. Reject him!
Update: Before I finish with this topic, I have to get a huge high five to Glenn Greenwald. He has been blogging on FISA and the president wanting to give amnesty to the telecommunication companies for the last couple of weeks. No one in the progressive bloggosphere is bringing the heat on Congress not to cave into the Bush administration like Glenn. Here’s just a portion of what he said today.
To his credit, Chris Dodd has been, by far, the most vocal Democratic presidential candidate on the issues of executive power abuses and restoring our constitutional framework. Unsurprisingly, he has issued a very strong condemnation of telecom amnesty along with a vow to try to stop it:
While the President may think that it’s right to offer immunity to those who break the law and violate the right to privacy of thousands of law-abiding Americans, I want to assure him it is not a value we have in common and I hope the same can be said of my fellow Democrats in the Senate.
For too long we have failed to respect the rule of law and failed to protect our fundamental civil liberties. I will do what I can to see to it that no telecommunications giant that was complicit in this Administration’s assault on the Constitution is given a get-out-of-jail-free card.
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From WaPo:
Attorney general nominee Michael B. Mukasey suggested today that the president could ignore federal surveillance law if it infringes on his constitutional authority as commander in chief.
Under sharp questioning about the Bush administration’s warrantless eavesdropping program, Mukasey said there may be occasions when the president’s wartime powers would supersede legal requirements to obtain a warrant to conduct wiretaps. (more…)
[...] I mentioned yesterday, Senator Dodd is trying to stand up and squash this love affair between some senators and the [...]
[...] He couldn’t or wouldn’t directly answer the question. I wrote that he should be rejected right then. There was nothing else that needed to be considered. So, we have gotten bogged down in the [...]