In a move straight out of the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel, a secret decision made by the Obama administration’s OLC provided retroactive legal justification for the FBI and telecommunications companies to improperly collect the phone records of American citizens. We would have no idea that the OLC issued More…
Brian Beutler at TPM reports that under pressure from Senate primary challenger Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.), Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) says he’d vote for Office of Legal Counsel chief nominee Dawn Johnsen, whose nomination has been stalled for almost a year:
“After voting ‘pass’ (which means no position) in
Greg Craig announced his departure as White House counsel on Friday, and you can Google for yourself all the Internet-dispersed acrimony and recriminations that his vexed tenure has inspired. This, however, via Marcy Wheeler, is news to me. Marc Ambinder:
The White House was also dissatisfied with Craig’s
The Hill reports today that liberal groups are stepping up their pressure on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to call a vote on Dawn Johnsen, President Obama’s pick to head the Office of Legal Counsel.
As I reported earlier this week, Republicans have stalled Johnsen’s nomination with More…
A “new form of obstructionism” by Republicans in the Senate is delaying confirmation of Obama’s nominees for federal judgeships, writes Doug Kendall, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, in Slate today.
With only three of 22 judicial nominees confirmed so far, it “seems clear that Senate Republicans are More…
When the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on the nomination of Dawn Johnsen to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in February, one of her harshest questioners was Sen. Arlen Specter, then a Republican from Pennsylvania facing a likely More…
Earlier this year when Arlen Specter was still a Republican, the Pennsylvania senator was among the harshest critics of Dawn Johnsen, the Indiana University law professor who is President Obama’s pick to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
The OLC is the office that housed such More…
The Washington Post’s story today about liberals who are frustrated that the Obama administration isn’t pressing harder to win confirmation for liberal-leaning judges to the federal courts should also serve as a reminder that there are a whole lot of key Justice Department posts still not confirmed yet, More…
The Senate today voted to confirm Thomas E. Perez to be Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice. The nomination has been pending without action in the Senate for more than four months due to Republican opposition. The final vote today More…
Manu Raju talks to Senate Democrats about the Glenn Beck-driven, almost entirely hysterical campaign against “czars.” The fuel: a letter written by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) about “czars.” I’ve reprinted the letter below the jump, but the key bit is this:
I respectfully urge you to disclose as much
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