04:23 pm
Koh: The Far Right’s Real Agenda
Anyone who thinks that the “controversy” over the nomination of my friend Harold Hongju Koh to serve as Legal Advisor to the Secretary of State is actually about, oh I don’t know, conservatives’ fear of the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea, should read this piece from The Hill today. An excerpt:
“You’re already having chatter between conservatives on who is going to be the nominee, what type of nominee is going to be put forward by President Obama,” said Brian Darling, the Heritage Foundation’s Senate director and a former top Judiciary Committee staffer.
Groups like the American Center for Law & Justice, the Coalition for a Fair Judiciary and the Committee for Justice will all prepare background research on potential nominees, setting up the eventual, inevitable attacks on the nominee as a left-wing extremist. . . .
Early front-runners for the bogeyman nod have cropped up: Darling mentioned Yale University Law School Dean Harold Koh, whom he called “very extreme.”
Gee, what a surprise. From the beginning, this has been not about Koh’s role at State but rather his fairly consistent appearance on short lists of potential Democratic nominees for the Supreme Court. The current campaign against him is designed to make him radioactive, so much so that no President would nominate him.
The same, of course, is true of the campaigns against Dawn Johnsen and Cass Sunstein. The idea is to destroy worthy candidates for the judiciary before they can even reach the position of being nominated.
The irony, of course is that this is how David Souter got on the court in the first place. He was a nobody, an obscure justice in a small state who was picked because Bush 41 didn’t want a fight. And Republicans have hated 41 for it ever since.
To Bush 44’s credit (the Harriet Myers fiasco notwithstanding), his team was able to identify extremely conservative attorneys who also happened to be extremely capable judges. The end result was that many Democrats in the Senate felt they could not oppose Roberts and Alito even though their views were similar to or more conservative than Mr. Litmus Test himself, Robert Bork.
What makes Republicans think, especially given the Democrats’ numbers in the Senate, that the result will be any different for Obama?
So I say to the President: go for it. Stick it in their eye. Nominate a young, talented, brilliant attorney who will stay on the court for thirty years.
There are a few folks who fit that description. Harold Koh happens to be one of them.
And now the real motivation behind the smear campaign becomes pretty clear.
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