So are oppositional editorials, and that's what we have today from the Old Gray Lady and her uptight friends from across town on the subject of Dawn Johnsen's nomination to head up the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.
Ms. Johnsen spent five years in the office during the Clinton administration, including time as its acting chief. She has criticized the Bush administration's interrogation and detention policies, and she joined in a statement of principles, signed by 19 former Office of Legal Counsel lawyers, that criticized the office's views on executive authority and its lack of transparency under Mr. Bush.
Those principled stands rankled Senate Republicans. In a letter to Senator Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, a group of Republican senators raised baseless concerns about Ms. Johnsen's fitness to help guide the war on terror and asked for her to be put through a second confirmation hearing.
Back in the day, Ms. Johnsen's efflorescent critiques of the Bush Administration's antiterror policies while a professor at Indiana University made her a darling of the left. In a 2008 blog about the Supreme Court's decision in Boumediene v. Bush, Ms. Johnsen claimed that U.S. detainee policies were "creating fertile conditions for the recruitment of terrorists." In March 2008 on Slate.com, she advised that the next Administration "must condemn our nation's past transgressions and reject Bush's corruption of American ideals."
That was all before the realities of fighting a relentless global terror network imposed themselves on the Obama Administration.
The Office of Legal Counsel's charge is to defend the President's authority in wartime. As well it is supposed to protect the Constitutional prerogatives of the executive in the normal tensions with Congress and the courts. The lawyers in the OLC are expected to provide legal guidance on executive actions, not work to check the power of the Presidency.
In other words, the Wall Street Journal believes it is now the Justice Department's responsibility to defend any and all action -- Constitutional or otherwise -- by the President of the United States. Because of terrorists.
Put another way, we're in mortal danger unless we put the Constitution and the concerns of our founding fathers on the back-burner for a while. Or even more accurately, defending the Constitution means the terrorists win.
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