This is already dull conventional wisdom, but it seems to me that the rumored new guy at the Justice Department, Michael Mukasey, stands a good chance of rescuing the DOJ from its Gonzalez-era status as a cesspool of depravity and incompetence and bringing us back to the glory days of John Ashcroft when one primarily worried about the Attorney-General's ludicrously wrongheaded ideology.
On a less banal note, though, a confirmation hearing isn't just about the nominee, it's also an opportunity to really force a would-be high official to sit in a chair and give some reasonable answers to questions from the Senate. Once someone has a job, it turns out to be remarkably easy to show up, say a bunch of stuff that's not really true, and then apologize a couple of days later. Just ask Mike McConnell. Which is just to say that, in general, it doesn't make sense to prejudge these things. Given what's gone down over the past few years, any appointee to this job deserves to be asked some tough questions about his views on whether torture is illegal, whether US Attorneys should be sacked for failing to mount partisan prosecutions, etc., etc., etc., and the confirmation issue shouldn't be prejudged until one sees whether or not satisfactory answers are forthcoming. Guys like Don Rumsfeld had good reputations before they joined this administration.
| 
Heads in the Sand
"Once someone has a job, it turns out to be remarkably easy to show up, say a bunch of stuff that's not really true, and then apologize a couple of days later."
Given that, one might ask what the point is of confirmation hearings in the first place. One would expect that, during confirmation hearings, these guys would say whatever they needed to say in order to get confirmed, secure in the knowledge that, after they've got the job, it won't be possible to remove them even if it turns out that they said a bunch of things about how they were going to do the job which they had no intention of sticking to.
I think that we've seen sufficient displays of that approach to confirmation hearings in the course of the Bush administration. On the other hand, I'm sort of surprised that we haven't seen even more of it than we have -- lots of people go to these hearings and, given an opportunity to tell a pleasing lie which would grease the skids towards confirmation, they instead choose to dodge or otherwise refuse to answer the question. For whatever reason, these guys aren't nearly so comfortable lying at their confirmation hearings as I would expect, and I guess I should take that to be a Good Thing.
Posted by PT | September 16, 2007 11:23 PM