October 17, 2007
Liveblogging The Michael Mukasey Confirmation Hearing: Part II
[Liveblogging The Michael Mukasey Confirmation Hearing: Part I]
End note. Thanks to the schedule provided by the Judiciary Committee, we were under the impression that the witness round was today. It is tomorrow, and about that we have no complaints.
Patrick Leahy didn't yell at anyone today. That hasn't happened in a long time. He expressed hope this morning and in closing that Mukasey's confirmation will signal the beginning of a healing process at DOJ. The Democrats on this panel have been accused of partisan bloodlust in this saga, but you have to believe Leahy wants this chapter closed. It's been an exhausting nine months for the committee, and the tug of war with the White House is far from over. A new attorney general that has the confidence of Congress means one fewer battlefront.
C-SPAN3 is replaying the hearing throughout the day; watch it here.
4:32. Cardin, who is intimately familiar with Election Day shenanigans, doesn't give up. He asks about a Georgia voter ID law that was overturned two years ago after a federal judge likened it to the Jim Crow-era poll tax. Cardin is undoubtedly aware that the issue goes before the Supreme Court next year.
"I think if identification is made available and... every step is taken that allows everyone who is allowed to vote to" have access to the polls, "it seems to me that the comparison to the poll tax would be over the top," Mukasey responds.
But is it right when the "energy committed to weeding out the few" outweighs that used to ensure greater numbers to the polls, Cardin asks, conjuring Democrats' impression of the Republican Justice Department. "That shouldn't be what the Justice Department is doing, I hope you agree with that."
"I certainly do," Mukasey responds.
By the way, whatever party was responsible for the deceptive fliers and phone calls that threatened Cardin's Senate bid last year: Mukasey considers the tactics "flat-out fraud and pernicious fraud."
4:20. And we're back. Ben Cardin says what we're all thinking: he will hopefully be the last senator to question Mukasey today. And instead of ticking off a number of his positions and asking Mukasey to agree or disagree -- a tactic that always seems to give the senator more air time than the nominee, hmm -- Cardin asks Mukasey to freestyle on the Civil Rights Division. Hate crimes will be a priority, Mukasey says, declining to tackle the touchier subject of voting rights, which Cardin seemed to be hoping would happen.
4:05. In strictly legal terms, there was never any "there" there in the U.S. attorneys firings scandal. The AG's job is also a political one, though, even as it is not meant to be performed politically. Mukasey seems to get that.
Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse uses his time to revive the ugliness of the attorney firings episode, finally asking about the impropriety of elected officials contacting prosecutors with regard to political investigations. Not appropriate, Mukasey responds. Does that include the president? "Most emphatically it includes the president," Mukasey says.
Leahy calls a 10-minute break. The committee members aren't going to get Mukasey to deliver opinions on contested and sensitive matters, and they're running out of things to ask.
3:50. Mukasey won't comment on the specifics of waterboarding because there is so little known about how it is used in the interrogation of terrorist suspects. But: "I would be uncomfortable with any trial that uses evidence that's been coerced."
South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, a former JAG who has defied the administration on detention policies, states again for the record that not only should torture be off the table, but classified evidence used against detainees should be made available to counsel.
"You're in a unique position in a unique time in American history to make sure that we balance our national security interests against the values that make us stronger than our enemy," Graham tells Mukasey. "And I have every confidence you will do a good job."
Quick follow-up from Chairman Patrick Leahy, and Mukasey reaffirms that intelligence demands do not justify detainee torture.
3:38. Why Mukasey can't be a Bush Supreme Court nominee: "The civil rights division is part of a movement and a process that is nothing less than genius in our politics: that a stain on our history can start to be lightened and hopefully at some point wiped out through the use of the law," Mukasey says, expanding a point he touched on this morning. "We have to make sure that that bit of genius is preserved."
3:24. Texas Sen. John Cornyn reminds us that conservative Republicans on the panel want their issues tended to as well. Mukasey agrees to take a look at the case of two border patrol agents convicted of shooting an illegal immigrant drug smuggler.
3:07. Ding ding ding. Asked his opinion of former Office of Legal Counsel chief Jack Goldsmith's book, "The Terror Presidency," Mukasey responds, "Superb."
In the years-long knife-fight between executive power hardliners and more moderate conservatives in DOJ, Mukasey appears to be casting his lot with James Comey, John Ashcroft, and now Goldsmith, a staunchly conservative legal mind who came to view some of DOJ's and OLC's most significant post-9/11 moves as constitutional overreach.
On counterterrorism tools such as the NSA surveillance program, Mukasey says, "I would cetainly suggest we go to Congress whenever we can. It always strengthens the hand of the president." That's Goldsmith's central criticism exactly. Mukasey also pledges to carefully review OLC's opinions on detainees, surveillance, etc. once confirmed as AG.
2:56. Some might see the cocktail of presidential ambition and the confirmation hearing process as a nauseating one, but there's an upside: diversity of topics. Instead of getting question after question ripped from the headlines, we hear the nominee react to some under-the-radar issues. To wit: Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback and a question about reducing the recidivism rate, an issue close to this Republican candidate's heart.
"I know that it's hard to generate popular suppport for prison programs," Mukasey says, "but when you face the fact that those people need to come out in a productive way, in order to do that they're going to need support within the programs."
2:45. Welcome back to The Gate's liveblog coverage of attorney general nominee Michael Mukasey's Senate confirmation hearing. (Click here for Part I.) After a break for lunch and a ceremony honoring the Dalai Lama with the Congressional Gold Medal, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hear testimony from the following witnesses: former AG Dick Thornburgh; Mary Jo White, former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York; Chuck Canterbury, president of the Fraternal Order of Police; Rear Admiral John Hutson, former Judge Advocate General of the Navy and currently dean of the Franklin Pierce Law Center; Dawn Johnsen of the Indiana University School of Law; and Theodore Shaw, president of the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund.
The witness round can traditionally be perilous for Judiciary nominees, but that probably won't happen here. Few in the rarefied legal world from which Mukasey hails have anything bad to say about him -- one of the reasons President Bush nominated him in the first place. Still, it will be interesting. Judicial appointments often center on schools of thought and philosophies, so we stand to learn quite a bit more about how the previously little-known nominee thinks.
Senators are hoping to see in Mukasey firmness in the face of pressure from above. His reputation as a straight-laced, law-and-order kind of judge indicates he can deliver in that regard. As for fire in the belly, there are indications he's got that, too.
In an interview on NPR this morning, a former federal prosecutor described an incident when he was referred to by his first name by the opposing counsel. Then-federal Judge Mukasey angrily called the counsel to the bench.
"You do that again, I will break you," Mukasey told the attorney.
Pretty impressive, even if you aren't a "Rocky IV" fan. The committee has just reconvened; looks like members who didn't get a chance to question Mukasey will do so now before the witness testimony.
Posted at 5:00 PM
Posted to:
Alberto Gonzales, Attorney Scandal, Bush Administration, Congress, Michael Mukasey, President Bush, Senate
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