"Johnsen expressed outrage over the extremism and lawlessness of the Bush administration not(like most political and media elites) in the last few weeks when doing so was easy and irrelevant, but did so loudly and continuously while those crimes were actually taking place. Her arguments were grounded in one simple belief:that the duty of the OLC is to tell the President when his desired policies are unconstitutional or otherwise illegal. But as a vivid reflection of how perverse Washington culture is, those attributes -- outrage over high-level government extremism and criminality, and a belief in the rule of law -- are apparently disqualifying:"
As the spring of 2009 proceeded, the conflict between President Obama and candidate Obama was becoming apparent. At that time the progressive base was reluctant to force the hand of their attractive young executive, who had inherited such a mess from his predecessor. It was reasonable to interpret Obama's reticence as normal caution in establishing his credentials as the new man in charge. Understandably, he would be slow to open the can of worms that was the illegality of the Bush administration's unconstitutional behavior. It was convenient to imagine a hands off approach that would allow Obama's Justice Department to do its duty while he proceeded, above the fray, with his positive agenda.
But if that is what progressives imagined, it cannot be what the President thought. Obama went out of his way send signals to the Washington establishment that he would not countenance investigations of the previous administration. And he must have known, therefore, that it was not in his political interest to see his own nominee to head the OLC seated. Obama's management of the problem is troubling, not least because it bespeaks a lack of integrity. Rather than work behind the scenes to extricate his nominee with some dignity intact, he chose instead to continue the charade. As recently as early October, progressive were encouraged to believe that the President had no intention of withdrawing her name. Greg Craig, Obama's top attorney in the White House, told the National Law Journal that the administration would not remove Johnsen's nomination. In the same interview, he declared that he had no intention of resigning his own position. Within a month, Craig announced his "resignation," the voluntary nature of which has engendered much discussion, and by Christmas week Ms. Johnsen's name was "returned" to the White House, dropped from a procedural motion that was required if her status as a nominee was to be carried forward to the next year. Thirty unconfirmed nominees were continued in their status; three, including Ms. Johnsen, were not. The descriptive adjective that comes to mind for this political protocol is "sleazy."
The history of administration neglect and spin of Ms. Johnsen's nomination has been thoroughly documented and explicated by bmaz, writing for emptywheel, and should be read in its entirety by anyone who is serious about understanding what happened to her.
Its conclusion:
"There is a lot of detritus in the wake of the Obama White House duplicity on the Dawn Johnsen nomination. They humiliated Dawn Johnsen by letting her twist in the wind, wasted a year of her life, disrupted the faculty and student body of the Indiana University School of Law and sold out a huge block of liberal and progressive voters who were the very voters and ground organizers carrying Obama to election in the first place.
Barack Obama and Harry Reid owe an explanation to both Dawn Johnsen, and the voters who worked so hard to elect them, as to why they intentionally left Johnsen's critical nomination out in the cold so long, and then killed it outright. The main media in the United States owe their readers the duty to ask the questions and demand answers. That much, at a minimum, is owed to the citizens."
Candidate Obama ran successfully on the slogan, "Change you can believe in." President Obama should have a placard in his office with the legendary quotation of Richard Nixon's Attorney General, John Mitchell: "Watch what we do, not what we say."
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