http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bromwich/what-is-it-like-to-be-a-d_b_72028.html On Thursday night, the Senate voted to confirm Michael Mukasey as the next attorney general.
The 53-40 majority included all the Republicans present and six Democrats who crossed over....
The Democrats are a sadder story. When you have given up this much, what is there left for you to be?
Obama, Clinton, Biden and Dodd had declared their opposition to Mukasey earlier in the week. They could not find the time to leave their campaigns for an election a year away, to show up for a vote more critical than any they are likely to see for months. Nor did they use this occasion for a major statement. Their formulae of dissent afforded no larger view of the meaning of such acts of acquiescence by the Senate.
Patrick Leahy is one of the few Democrats with a constitutional bone in his body; and he voted against Mukasey. Yet Leahy when provoked, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, appears able to pass only from irritation to extreme "disappointment" with the breakers of the law in government. He has not yet used his power to enforce the subpoena of high officials to testify under oath about the things they have done and hidden. His disapproval of Mukasey stayed within the bounds of decorous and formal protest....
It seems likely that many deplore the message and posture of this president who would by no means wish his actions undone....
Given the chance to resist as a formed majority, their opposition has, in less than a year, been whittled down to ceremonial remonstrance. And the pattern is now almost ingrained. After all, this was the first president in our history to boast of assassinations: "All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries," he said in his State of the Union address of 2003. "Many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way--they are no longer a problem." President Bush, in his own words, told us that he was talking about suspects, not men convicted on evidence of a crime. The president made us all his accomplices when he remarked that the murdered men had not been given a legal process. That easy slide into the argot of hoodlums by the leader of the free world was noticed by a few at the time. But it still echoes in the minds of the Democrats, because it puts a question to them. Do they have as convincing a cry? A summons to nobility and principle that could rival the coarse efficiency of the snarl of vengeance?
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