Mukasey, Inevitably

So the Prez gets what he wants, not that there was really much question that he was going to. This time around, though, there's not a clear-cut good or bad answer. Both choices of Mukasey or not-Mukasey were pretty unappealing. Mukasey demonstrated that he had no intention of standing up to torture, but then, no one who would be acceptable to Bush was ever going to do that, anyway. On the other hand (if there is another hand), it's not beyond the Senate to take up that matter themselves. Yeah, I know, this is the current Democratic Senate we're talking about, the opposition Senate who rarely say no the Prez. But it's possible. In his apology for supporting Mukasey, in The New York Times this week, New York Senator Chuck Schumer wrote:

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.

If Mukasey won't get on the record about waterboarding, at least the Senate can.

But because nothing is easy for Senate Democrats, the circumstances surrounding the vote itself have seemed a bit suspicious. Early this morning, I watched an e-mail exchange develop over the question of why Hillary and Obama didn't vote against the nomination. Further investigation revealed that Chris Dodd and Joe Biden hadn't voted, either. Bill Richardson noticed that and wasted no time in issuing an attack against the four. Throughout the day, TPM Election Central was following the story and first weighed in with the fact that the vote on the nomination was announced at the end of the day Thursday, catching most Senate staffers by surprise. The four senators running for president couldn't be guaranteed that they could return from their campaigns in time to even cast a vote. A little while later, TPM Election Central returned with more of the story. The vote was rushed as part of a deal with Republicans to get a vote on a defense appropriations bill that excluded funding for Iraq and Afghanistan. That bill was passed a short time after the Senate approved Mukasey. That may cause the presidential senators a few instances of embarrassment for missing an important vote (though not one in which they could've affected the outcome), but it provides the Senate with a bit of protection to send the Prez Iraq-funding bills tied to troop withdrawal without fear that they can be accused of not supporting the military. Whether they'll have the backbone to use that strategy remains to be seen, but at least they've got the opportunity.