Attorney General candidate Mukasey: thumbs down

Mukasey's confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee went off the deep end yesterday:

He suggested that both the administration’s program of eavesdropping without warrants and its use of “enhanced” interrogation techniques for terrorism suspects, including waterboarding, might be acceptable under the Constitution even if they went beyond what the law technically allowed.

Technically? Let's look at the Constitution, Article 6:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land

The article in question may or may not apply to exactly the kind of "extralegal" behavior of President Bush, but its ambivalence doesn't exonerate him (its focus was on superseding state laws and constitutions).

But the whole reason for forming the United States, independent of Britain, was to gain relief from arbitrary exercise of power - power exercised outside the definition of law. Read the grievances in the Declaration of Independence - it's almost entirely a list of King George's exercise of arbitrary power.

The next attorney general needs to have enough respect for law to believe the President is beneath it. That's clearly not Mukasey.