Justice Watch: Attacks On Harold Koh Need To Stop
UPDATE: Scott Horton reports that Koh’s nomination and that of Dawn Johnsen are being "held hostage" through GOP blackmail on torture documents from the Bush/Cheney OLC.
A reliable Justice Department source advises me that Senate Republicans are planning to “go nuclear” over the nominations of Dawn Johnsen as chief of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice and Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh as State Department legal counsel if the torture documents are made public. The source says these threats are the principal reason for the Obama administration’s abrupt pullback last week from a commitment to release some of the documents. A Republican Senate source confirms the strategy. It now appears that Republicans are seeking an Obama commitment to safeguard the Bush administration’s darkest secrets in exchange for letting these nominations go forward."
How many times does the GOP have to learn the "it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up" lesson?
Because that sure as hell sets up a "what are you trying to hide" series of Pandora’s box questions for John Cornyn and Jon Kyl, who have been the point men on the discredit Koh and Johnsen tour, doesn’t it? Seems to me that the "Arlen’s making us do it" story was a so much bullshit cover for CYA — question is, whose asses are being covered and why? Would that some enterprising Beltway journalist would ask them…today.
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Dahlia Lithwick had a Slate piece this week on Harold Koh that deserves a careful read. In it, she brings up an issue that has been troubling me for some time: having philosophical differences with someone with whom you can disagree, but not feel the need to destroy.
It’s an issue that comes up frequently in highly charged political arenas where appointments — especially the last few years in legal circles — have been so highly charged.
The hubbub about Harold Koh has, thus far, been a lot of hot air bound up with a crock o’ shite and a dose of indignation peppered with ill intent.
In other words, the usual wurlitzer frenzy.
Harold Koh is not a radical legal figure. He has served with distinction in both Democratic and Republican administrations (under Presidents Clinton and Reagan), and in that capacity he sued both Democratic and Republican administrations. He was confirmed unanimously 11 years ago, and yet this time around, he is a threat to American sovereignty.
Clyne’s gross distortions of Koh’s views have gone completely unanswered in the mainstream press. You can certainly argue that ignoring the whole story signals that it’s beneath notice. But it also means that, once again, the only players on the field work for Fox News. So last night, while you were reheating Monday’s lasagna, Glenn Beck was jubilantly warning his viewers that Koh went to Europe and "protested against Mother’s Day." And thus one of the country’s leading academics—a man who has authored 175 law review articles and/or legal editorials and eight books—has been reduced to an ad hoc answer to a gotcha question that nobody but the questioner himself seems to understand.
Why am I bothered by this? This kind of vicious slash-and-burn character attack, the kind in which the nominee is attacked as a vicious hater of America, is hardly new. The little trick of upending Dean Koh’s legal arguments and recharacterizing them as the nefarious plotting of Dr. Evil is a surprise to nobody at this point. But we can be bothered even if we’re not surprised. When moderate Americans and the mainstream media allow a handful of right-wing zealots to occupy the field in the public discussions of an Obama nominee, they become complicit in a character assassination. Dawn Johnsen, a law professor at Indiana University and one of the most qualified candidates ever tapped to head the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, now faces the prospect of a Senate filibuster because it took weeks for the mainstream media to evince outrage at how she was being treated.
Amen. Good for Dahlia for calling bullshit.
I’m working to bring a guest or two in to talk about this issue. More on that as I firm things up.
Oh, good grief. I hadn’t been following this so hadn’t noticed the wingnuts doing what they do best in this case, too.
I couldn’t figure out why until I read your link to Dahlia and hers to Goldstein at HuffPost:
from Dahlia’s piece
Oh, lordy, it just never ends, does it? I used to wail, pre-November, that keeping up with all the outrages was just impossible – why did I think it would end with Obama’s election?
Even if I were happy with everything he’s doing (which I’m not, so that requires work to “make him” do right), the wingnuts only talent is spinning hysteria out of falsehoods, twisting facts into panic-inducing fairy tales.
Well, at least there is now one more blog post defending Harold Koh. : )