Posted by
Defend America on Thursday, March 04, 2010 4:58:00 PM
Johnsen passes hurdle
Obama's Justice pick faces Senate
By JOSH GERSTEIN | 03/04/10 12:17 PM
The Senate Judiciary Committee has again given its approval to one of
President Obama’s longest-stalled nominations, the choice of Indiana
University law professor Dawn Johnsen to serve as head of the Justice
Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
The panel voted, 12-7, along party lines to send Johnsen’s nomination
on to the full Senate. That’s a tad better than the 11-7 vote she
managed last time, when Sen. Arlen Specter declined to vote. After
becoming a Democrat, Specter gave Johnsen the nod this time around.
http://www.politico.com/politico44/perm/0310/johnsen_passes_hurdle_57d45dda-94f7-4cc3-ac54-429e17ee7882.html
Andrew C. McCarthy has written about her and her radical views. Here is something he wrote today about her:
As we're reminded of by Ed Whelan's characteristically thorough
analysis of Goodwin Liu, whom Obama wants to place on the 9th
Circuit (start with this Bench Memo
and scroll down), it is hard to grasp and keep up with how radical many
of this administration's appointees are. But Ms. Johnsen stands out,
and not just because of her abortion extremism (it was she who argued,
in a Supreme Court brief, that abortion restrictions were tantamount to
violations of the Constitution's prohibition against slavery), or even
because of her unabashed commitment to using the law to further what
she calls “the
progressive agenda” of “universal health care, public funding for
childcare, paid family leave, and . . . the full range of economic
justice issues, from the minimum wage to taxation policy to financial
support for struggling families.”
She also stands out
because of the position for which she has been nominated. DOJ's Office
of Legal Counsel is the last place in government where we would want a
hard-edged ideologue — and while that would be true at any time, it is
especially true with the current Justice Department, which is political to a fare thee well.
And with DOJ already rife with lawyers who volunteered their services
to America's enemies, do we really want OLC to be run by a lawyer who
wrote that one of the Obama administration's first orders of business
should be to "order an
immediate review to determine which detainees should be released and
which transferred to secure facilities in the United States” for
civilian trials?
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YjgyMGRjZWUzZjQ3OGY5MDJlM2RjMzdmMmI4OTFiZGE=
Now, here is an article that Mr. McCarthy penned taking Johnsen to task for saying that abortion restrictions are like Constitutional restrictions on slavery:
http://article.nationalreview.com/387022/doj-nominee-shocked-by-her-own-words/andrew-c-mccarthy