First Stupak, Now Dawn Johnsen….Gone! One Good Friday

Gotta love how they schedule this stuff for the Friday memory hole but either way, it’s been a good day. Stupak learned how a betrayal and a vote can cost you, and now the far left moonbats are crying over Dawn Johnsen withdrawing her nomination for the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel:

The withdrawal represents a major blow to progressive groups and civil liberties advocates who had pushed for Johnsen to take over the post previously held by, among others, John Yoo, the author of the infamous torture memos under George W. Bush.

Why did she bolt?

…the votes, apparently, weren’t there. Johnsen had the support of Sen Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) but was regarded skeptically by Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) — primarily for her positions on torture and the investigation of previous administration actions. A filibuster, in the end, was likely sustainable. Faced with this calculus, the White House chose not to appoint Johnsen during Senate recess, which would have circumvented a likely filibuster but would have kept her in the position for less than two years.

She was a far left wackjob through and through. In the 80’s, while working in NARAL, she actually tried to argue that any restrictions on abortion should be considered slavery, and then there were her bizarre national security opinions:

Her 2008 academic article “What’s a President to Do? Interpreting the Constitution in the Wake of Bush Administration Abuses” gathers the Left’s full array of anti-war tropes and disguises them as legal analysis. There is the determination to ignore the terrorist attacks of the 1990s, such that the War on Terror is presented as something President Bush started after 9/11 rather than a years-long jihadist provocation to which the United States finally responded after 9/11. This framework would make it impossible to prosecute as war crimes such pre-9/11 atrocities as the bombings of the USS Cole and the embassies in East Africa. Johnsen further denigrates as an “extreme and implausible Commander-in-Chief theory” Bush’s rationale for warrantless surveillance of suspected al-Qaeda communications into and out of the United States. In fact, the practice was strongly supported by federal court precedent and has since been reaffirmed by the appellate court Congress created specifically to consider such issues. And Johnsen has recently written that the new administration “should order an immediate review to determine which detainees should be released and which transferred to secure facilities in the United States” for civilian trials.

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Particularly rich is Johnsen’s diatribe against Bush’s purportedly outlandish claim of power to ignore statutes that encroach on executive authority. When Johnsen served in the Clinton administration (which invented extraordinary rendition, detained Cuban refugees without trial at Guantanamo Bay, conducted warrantless national-security searches, and attacked a foreign country without congressional authorization), OLC’s official position was that “the President has enhanced responsibility to resist unconstitutional provisions that encroach upon the constitutional powers of the Presidency.” The office opined that several statutes (including privacy provisions in the federal wiretap law) could not bind the president, and Johnsen herself authored a 1997 OLC opinion concluding that presidents were above consumer-credit-disclosure laws. In that case, she broadly asserted that “statutes that do not expressly apply to the President must be construed as not applying to him if such application would involve a possible conflict with his constitutional prerogatives.”

A parallel hypocrisy is illustrated by Johnsen’s rants about how the Bush administration “politicized” the Justice Department. Her solution to this problem: Politicize the Justice Department. She argues that job applicants who may have been passed over by the Bush administration for holding leftist political views should get “special consideration” in DOJ hiring but, at the same time, maintains that nominees for the federal judiciary should be rejected out of hand if they embrace constitutional originalism or are members of the judicially conservative Federalist Society.

(Much more here from Mataharley)

Not surprising, the far left loved her. But she’s gone, for now.

A DC insider who was familiar with the confirmation fight has a few points about her withdrawal:

1) there is no connection with the timing of the Stevens announcement – the Johnsen thing was probably planned weeks ago to get “buried” with a Friday afternoon release.

2) Personally, I think Johnsen has done a disservice to the President by not withdrawing before this – they NEED to fill that important slot and she has been nothing but a political albatross.

3) This will dishearten already disheartened lib groups – unlike their conservative counterparts during Republican White Houses, liberal legal interest groups do not have a seat at the table regarding judicial selection – Johnsen was really a big coup for them – gone.

4) The Johnsen “journey” is the only way we stop extreme appointments – not with impotent threats of filibusters, but by raising the political stakes for Dem Senators in purple states. They don’t want to have to cast bad votes – make the vote go away. Johnsen was not beaten by a floor filibuster.

Another feather in the cap of Republican lawmakers and conservatives everywhere. The pickings are slim nowadays for good news so enjoy this one.

Curt

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