From Elena Kagan’s first comments about Cheney’s illegal wiretapping program yesterday (at 2:10), it sounds almost like she’d vote for rule of law in the al-Haramain case (though the case is probably in the gray area of cases on which she should recuse herself). DiFi: And we have just had a case. It came–by a [...]

I’m going to have more to say about James Clapper’s nomination to be Director of National Intelligence. But for now I want to point out similarities between how the Administration’s treated that nomination and its involvement in primaries. Two things make James Clapper’s nomination anything but a done deal. Most important to us little people [...]

I was at a loss for words about Arlen “Never Know Whether He’s Haggis or Scrapple” Specter’s loss on Tuesday. In the Village, our tragic figures never have the glory of Shakespeare or the Greeks, but rather only the tawdriness of Hollywood, and the whole thing really just made me sad–sad about the state of [...]

Sorry I’ve been distracted all day. And yes, I will try to comment on the surprise news that Steven Kappes will be leaving the CIA next month later this evening. But in the meantime, I wanted to look at this exchange between Arlen “Scrapple that used to be Haggis” Specter and Eric Holder on the [...]

It was not Ben Nelson who killed the nomination of Dawn Johnsen, nor was it Arlen Specter or Senate Republicans. No, the sole reason Dawn Johnsen is not leading the OLC is that Barack Obama and his coterie of advisors did not want Dawn Johnsen leading the OLC.

In a conference call focused closely on the possibility of moving health care through reconciliation, Arlen Specter invoked Justice Jackson’s comment to justify his support for putting health care through the reconciliation process. He said Jackson’s comment–that “the Constitution is not a suicide pact”–would be considered applicable to stale-mated government. He later said he’d like [...]

ThinkProgress has an absolutely devastating report on 111 Republican members of Congress who have attacked last year’s stimulus bill, but who have since taken credit for it. Click through for details on Republican hypocrisy close to you, but for a taste, here are the MI GOP stimulus hypocrites. Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) Signed A Letter [...]

The failure of the Obama Administration to support the Dawn Johnsen nomination, a far less than good faith effort that finally resulted in Johnsen’s nomination being killed by operation of Senate Rule, was not due to a lack of 60 votes for cloture on the nomination, but instead was to permit the abuse of the OLC, just as the Bush Administration before them, in order to cover up governmental illegality.

How did it happen that, after the entire Senate Judiciary Committee approved limits on Section 215 during the 2005 PATRIOT authorization, the section was blown open during the conference report, effectively allowing the use of Section 215 in data mining?

Specter seems to have stopped his campaign to get Grassley to really negotiate on health care.