It is worthwhile to consider what is going on here. While I rhink Glenn is correct--that there is a core of Washington legislators, members of the media and membes of the revolving door bureaucracy who are committed to the preservation of their positions of power and privilege, it is also the case that there is a partisan version of this as well. At its most loathsome, one can think of this partisan conflict as a fight over who gets to divide up the money.

I think what is going on with Schumer and the Democratic leadership (not talking about DiFi here, who is that core of Beltway corruption that Glenn is talking about in this post) is that they see the Republicans as driving themselves off a cliff. By continuing to back Bush as a bloc, they are, in Schumer's view, biinding themselves inextricably to both the occupation in Iraq, but also to these intrusions on American civil liberties, to a massively failed health care system and to the gross mismanagement embodied by Katrina.

Schumer said, I believe sincerely, shortly after the midterms that the Republicans would turn on Bush on the occupation (and, implicitly, on everything else) by the summer of 07. Otherwise their seats would be at risk.

This has not happened. So Schumer and the rest of the leadership is perfectly willing to sacrifice American lives, treasure and constitutional principle in order to have an election campaign that will focus on the incredible collection of Republican failures that the last 8 years will represent.

However, it may well be that this is a tipping point--that the cooperation of the democrats in giving Bush--and his solid bloc of voters--ends with torture. It may be that the democrats finally are seeing that they may be viewed as complicit, rather than in opposition, in Bush's disastrous policy making. It's not hard to argue that they have been; the claims that they need a filibuster-proof majority to pass any legislation flies in the face of republican legislative accomplishments in a similar situation. Moreover, and more damning, they have not chosen to use mechanisms that WOULD have significantly forestalled Bush's program, like refusing to iniitate revenue bills that did not end the occupation, or for the CIA that did not explicitly ban the funding of torture illegal under US treaty and law.

So I think, frustrating as it is, that this is a point where they cannot pretend, any longer, that they are not equally responsible. And it is very ironic that Schumer, who personifies this profoundly immoral strategy, is the person with his pectoral in a wringer.

Schumer's phone has been busy all day. But if you're a NY state resident, I do suggest you give him a call and ask him just when his principles do kick in. (202) 224-6542

I commend you and Glenn doing the "Code Pink" thing from the rear of the room

Ah, finally the personal attacks. You're impugning my manhood by associating me with a womens' movement, and you're including Greenwald, presumably because he's gay. What the hell?

I have never indulged in a personal attack against you. I have always attacked your arguments and your ideas. I must really have scored a point if you feel the need to resort to this kind of hysterical bluster.

On the merits of your argument, your point fails again. Specuating about the primacy of one or another position in the nation based on what lawmakers say and do is not reasonable. Polls show that most Americans oppose torture, waterboarding etc. by far. I know you like to dismiss polls when convenient; go ahead. But without polls, you are forced to guess what most people think. You're welcome to your guesses; I don't think they have much relation to reality.

The WSJ is just being silly and stupid here.

If torture were not already illegal, then Mukasey wouldn't have a problem. Mukasey would just say that the techniques are classified, he doesn't know what they are, but it doesn't matter because waterboarding is legal. The reason he is in a bind is because he, like all of is, is fully aware that the president of the US, and his direct reports have expressly violated the law with regard to torture. The reason waterboarding is the sticking point is because there is no doubt that it is torture. When you can show diagrams from the Inquisition wrt the practice, you remove all doubt. And, as the president says, the US doesn't torture.

More legislation would change nothing. The theory under which the torture by the CIA is legal is that it was ordered by the president, and if the president does it, it is not illegal. This theory has already been rejected--and would be again if they brought it to the supreme court.

There is no excuse for confirming an AG who doesn't know whether torture is against the law.

If you imagined that the governance of this country was guided, even approximately, by the provisions of the Constitution, then you would have to agree that, given all the prior opportunities and mandates to exercise its Constitutional powers and repsonsibilities that Congress ducked, to make an issue of torture only now, with Mukasey's nomination, seems inconsistent, insincere, and not inspiring confidence that they will stick with their guns. But the governance of this country hasn't been even approximately Constitutional for sixty years. Congress accords the President such deference, especially on foreign affairs in general, and war-making in particular, that the reversal of this para-Constitutional practice, if it is going to happen, would be expected to happen by sudden fits and illogical starts.

Though the unwritten constitution has given the President great deference, the outward forms have continued to be observed, and they remain a potential set of flashpoints by which Congress may yet be roused to its Constitutional duties and powers. For example, though it seems laughable to call it the "power" of the purse if, when push comes to shove and a President demomnstrates that he really wants no-oversight-attached war funding by his veto of the strings-attached version, Congress will rush to concede lest the war go unfunded, we still do go through the formality of requiring all public funds to be approved by Congress, and that created at least the potential for resistance. The Congress still passes on all spending, so there remains that potential flashpoint of resistance, one which has not itself fully played out.

One of these formalities we still observe is that the Senate at least formally passes on the fitness of nominees to judicial and executive positions. There is this idea, completely alien to the Constitution, that the President is, absent a nominee's frank criminality, somehow entitled to his picks, because the government is somehow his team, that makes the nomination process largely a formality. But the formality is still observed, and the observance, in this case, has put the Senators in the hot seat of having, for once, to not just let torture happen somewhere else, under the President's direction, but to take the active part of approving an AG candidate that one of their number was improvident enough to corner into the effective admission that he would preside over the ongoing torture program if confirmed. So now official torture is in the public eye as it has never been before, however much people such as Greenwald who follow this may have long been acutely aware of this affront, and the Senators will have to positively vote for torture to vote for Mukasey. While I share Greenwald's belief that they will still probably go along, I think that, illogical and non-germane to the underlying issue as it may be, the logic of appearances may start to unravel the contradictions between the unwritten constitution and the real thing, and perhaps the Senate will start this time back on a path to Constitutional governance.

There are signs that this could happen on the power of the purse front as well. It would be completely illogical for Congress to balk at re-authorizing Ms Nord's position, when they have swallowed the camel of continued no-strings Iraq War funding. But because it would be easier to deep-six Ms Nord, because there would be no nonsense about "supporting the troops" when the issue is job loss as the appropriate response to non-feasance by some DC desk jockey, perhaps Congress actually will gather the cojones to assert the power of the purse and de-fund the chief of Consumer Protection until such time as that office starts protecting consumers. And if they do it to this particular unworthy, they might do it to others, such as COL Boylan, or the folks at FEMA who staged that phony press conference, or the WH scinece advisor who censored Dr Gerberding. Starting with the easy, doable, targets might give them the courage, and provide examples legitimizing the exercise of the power of the purse to assert Congressional control where the administration is not faithfully executing the laws, such that, who knows, maybe they'll work their way up to ending the war. I may not be the only one who thinks that this scenario is not implausible. The administration seems strangely eager to get the funding bills all passed quickly. Why else, if not to frustrate any possibility that the power of the purse might actually be turned to effective use by this Congress?

Sure, I share Greenwald's doubts that the Mukasey opposition means anything. Senators concerned about official torture should have done something about it a long time ago. But I don't think that a simplistic view; that logically, if they were serious about objecting to torture, they would already have done something; fits the odd and contorted mess we have let our political culture get into by letting an unwritten constitution subvert the real thing. We allowed official torture of the Constitution before we got around to torturing people, and stopping the latter is going to happen only as we gradually re-knit what has become unraveled in our self-governance. And that re-knitting can only happen as fitfully and illogically as the unraveling, so I remain hopeful that this is the beginning of the end of the nightmare.