No To Mukasey

By Cernig

I just want to throw my hat into the ring with Matt Yglesias and Andrew Sullivan:

An attorney general who believes a president has a permanent right to ignore the rule of law because peacetime is now wartime for ever, is an attorney-general defending the rule of one man over the rule of law. If I were a Senator, (heh, indeed) I'd vote no. This is the faultline of our time. If we are redefining war as a permanent state of being, and redefining presidential authority to give him/her extra-legal and extra-constitutional power to what s/he wants anywhere in the world, including the United States and to its citizenry, then American liberty is in extreme peril. To approve an attorney general who does not dissent from this position is a terrible precedent.

Although, as a foreigner, I have to say that the presumption that somehow such things are worse when visited on Americans rather than any other nationality of human being is highly unpalatable, in an explicitly exceptionalist way.