Courage, Really

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/10899

Courage, Really
by Brian Morton | Nov 8 2007



Well, that was nice. For a little while there, it looked like the Democrats might actually have stepped up and denied George W. Bush a new toy. As usual, it's not the case.

The deliberations in the Senate Judiciary Committee were feverish, with members on the "D" side trying to figure out whether attorney general nominee Michael Mukasey was worth sending to a full vote of the Senate or not. But then, last Friday, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer--one of the people who originally lauded Mukasey as someone who would hold the line against Bush's trampling of the Constitution--decided to support Mukasey. "I deeply esteem those who believe the issue of torture is so paramount that Judge Mukasey's views on it should be the sole determinant of our vote," Schumer said that afternoon. "But I must respectfully disagree." California Sen. Dianne Feinstein also caved, but she's caved so many times for Bush, despite the true-blueness of her state and her San Francisco bona fides, that she might as well stick an i'm still for w bumper sticker on her Hart Senate Office Building door.

Maryland's own junior senator, Ben Cardin, took his own sweet time getting around to saying no to the Mukasey nomination, unveiling his opinion Monday afternoon, after Schumer and Feinstein already defected, so to speak, so it wasn't exactly sending a message to the leadership. Once Mukasey picked up the votes of two Democrats, it would have taken three Republicans to come over and vote against him, and the odds of that happening come right after the chances of Comet 17P/Holmes exploding into a Pepsi ad. Republican Arlen Specter, usually the Hamlet of the Judiciary Committee, did his usual hand-wringing and sternly condemned Mukasey's dithering answers regarding waterboarding before falling in line and supporting the nomination.

What was so hard to figure out, folks? Waterboarding is torture, always has been torture, and always will be torture. We prosecuted the Japanese for it in World War II, and the Geneva Conventions pretty much make it clear that it's torture. Yet Mukasey says all Congress has to do is "make it illegal" and he would come out against it.

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It is moments like these that show why Democrats and the Congress face an approval rating as low or lower than the president's. Democrats have spent the last 10 months seeing Senate Republicans block every piece of legislation requiring a supermajority for anything and everything--but they haven't done anything about it. Republicans in the House have been using procedural tricks to get poison-pill amendments into bills, thus causing the Dems to pull them from the floor. It's time to play hard or go home.

Mukasey now will likely join the Bush Cabinet come the end of the month. And we'll be left waiting for yet another opportunity for the Democratic Congress to stand up as a whole for what is right, as opposed to spending long weekends with their fingers to the wind.
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