WASHINGTON, 10 November 2007 — The Senate late Thursday narrowly confirmed former federal Judge Michael Mukasey as the 81st attorney general, giving the nominee the lowest level of congressional support of any Justice Department leader in the past half-century. The 53-40 vote came after more than four hours of impassioned floor debate between Republicans and Democrats over his refusal to acknowledge waterboarding as a form of torture.
Mukasey avoided defeat only because a half-dozen Democrats voted in favor of the appointment along with Republicans and Democrat-turned-independent Joe Lieberman, Connecticut.
The fractured tally signals that Mukasey will face a deeply skeptical Democratic Congress as he takes over at Justice, which has been demoralized and emptied of senior leadership in the wake of scandals.
Mukasey was accorded the fewest “yes” votes for any Attorney General since 1952; just weeks after lawmakers of both parties had predicted his easy confirmation.
Mukasey’s was Bush’s pick to succeed former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who resigned amid months of controversy over the firings of several federal prosecutors and allegations that he perjured himself in testimony before Congress on the president’s warrantless wiretapping program.
Although Gonzales resigned on Sept. 17, the US Justice Department’s internal watchdog continues to investigate whether Gonzales misled Congress and whether political appointees within the department.
Mukasey, 66, outraged many lawmakers and human rights groups by repeatedly refusing to classify waterboarding, a simulated drowning technique, as torture.
The practice is banned by domestic law and international treaties, but US law applies to Pentagon personnel and not the CIA. The Bush Administration won’t say whether it has allowed the agency’s employees to use waterboarding against terror detainees. “He will be an outstanding attorney general,” said President Bush in a statement.
“Alberto Gonzales owed his political career and his legal career to a good extent to President Bush. Judge Mukasey does not,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, who along with Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., sided with Republicans on the panel to advance the nomination to the full Senate.
Feinstein and Schumer, whose support for Mukasey on the Senate Judiciary Committee allowed the nomination to proceed to the Senate floor, made no apologies for their “yes” votes, portraying them as pragmatic decisions aimed at improving the Justice Department.
Schumer, a key party leader who has come under sharp attacks for suggesting Mukasey as a nominee to the White House, said he is “wrong on torture — dead wrong.” But Schumer said Mukasey’s answers on other questions show he will act as a bulwark against extremists within the Bush administration. “Politics has been allowed to infect all manner of decision-making,”
“The Department of Justice needs Judge Mukasey at work tomorrow morning,” said Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee. “The Department of Justice has been categorized as dysfunctional and in disarray.”
In a recent article on Mukasey, The Forward, a Jewish weekly, noted that Mukasey “is an Orthodox Jew and political conservative, is a jurist who kept his politics and religion out of the court. “As a judge, Mukasey broke with the White House on a anti-terror issue by ruling that a suspect must have access to a lawyer. And unlike some judges, he has abjured involvement in Jewish advocacy,” said The Forward.
