I used to really like Chuck Schumer. Those feelings have changed in recent history. He is not a man of principal – he is a man of covering his own ass. In today’s New York Times, he has authored an Op-Ed explaining his reason for supporting Mukasey:
I AM voting today to support Michael B. Mukasey for attorney general for one critical reason: the Department of Justice — once the crown jewel among our government institutions — is a shambles and is in desperate need of a strong leader, committed to depoliticizing the agency’s operations.
The department has been devastated under the Bush administration. Outstanding United States attorneys have been dismissed without cause; career civil-rights lawyers have been driven out in droves; people appear to have been prosecuted for political reasons; young lawyers have been rejected because they were not conservative ideologues; and politics has been allowed to infect decision-making.
A strong leader like someone who won’t say if water boarding is illegal? Does Schumer really consider that a strong leader? I would like to see what a weak leader is if that’s the case.
Should we reject Judge Mukasey, President Bush has said he would install an acting, caretaker attorney general who could serve for the rest of his term without the advice and consent of the Senate. To accept such an unaccountable attorney general, I believe, would be to surrender the department to the extreme ideology of Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, David Addington. All the work we did to pressure Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign would be undone in a moment.
That right there needs to be run when Schumer is up for re-election. Instead of fighting for the Constitution, he is caving to the bullying of George Bush. What a disgrace this man is. If he is too scared to fight then get the hell out of Senate. The people from New York deserve better than someone who will lie down to bullying comments by the most unpopular President in American history.
Here is the part that really gets me:
I deeply oppose this administration’s opaque policy on the use of torture — its refusal to reveal what forms of interrogation it considers acceptable. In particular, I believe that the cruel and inhumane technique of waterboarding is not only repugnant but also illegal under current laws and conventions. I also support Congress’s efforts to pass additional measures that would explicitly ban this and other forms of torture. I voted for Senator Ted Kennedy’s anti-torture amendment in 2006 and am a co-sponsor of his similar bill in this Congress.
Judge Mukasey’s refusal to state that waterboarding is illegal was unsatisfactory to me and many other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. But Congress is now considering — and I hope we will soon pass — a law that would explicitly ban the use of waterboarding and other abusive interrogation techniques. And I am confident that Judge Mukasey would enforce that law.
So Congress will pass a law outlawing it? The Republicans will allow this to actually come to a vote? Mr. Schumer needs to remove his head from his ass. You can bet that some Republican will put a secret block on this legislation, that or Bush will give it one of his vetos or signing statements. Has Chuck Schumer even been in the Senate over the past seven years and seen what’s happened?
And why do we need a law banning water boarding? Must we explicitly define any method of torture in law and bar it? Gee well water boarding is illegal, but if we stand the prisoner up and shoot a garden hose in their mouth then that isn’t boarding, it’s vertical drowning simulation, that isn’t illegal.
So what we are doing is setting a very illegal precedent now. Instead of doing that what we need is a special prosecutor to look at the circumstances and let a court decide if water boarding constitutes torture. If the Democrats had balls they would do what the Democrats did in 1973 – if you want this new AG confirmed then we get a special prosecutor. But they won’t do that. Instead we are plagued with the biggest bunch of pussies this country has ever seen.