Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Holder Clone Rejected By Senate--Again

I figured that James M. Cole, Obama recess appointee as Number Two in the Holder Justice Department must be a relative of James M. Cole, circus owner. Ever since the Senate (heavily-Democratic at the time) rejected Cole for the position of Assistant Attorney General, legal scholar Barack Obama has been conducting a circus attempting to make Cole's position permanent.

This past week, the Senate rejected him again on a 50-40 vote. Sen. Harry Reid (D-Bankruptvada) used a last-minute parliamentary trick which allows Obama to reintroduce Cole's name at a later time. He switched his vote from "yes" to "no," allowing "reconsideration" of the nomination at a more opportune moment. And while I'm talking about the vote, Indiana voters should take note that Dick Lugar (R-Ind) crossed the aisle to vote yes with the Democrats. Chairman Patrick Leahy opined that this was "the wrong filibuster at the wrong time." Leahy believes that Cole has demonstrated the leadership Obama "needs in the fight against terrorism."

Oh? Cole is an Eric Holder clone. He strenuously supports the concept of terrorists captured on foreign battlefields being treated as common criminals in the civilian courts. He is rabidly anti-military. He thinks that no military tribunal should ever have jurisdiction over defendants who are not American service men and women. He assisted in the prosecution of the Navy SEALs who were ultimately exonerated of all charges of roughing up a terrorist.

He currently supports the ongoing persecution and prosecution of intelligence agents who may or may not have used enhanced interrogation techniques during a period of time when enhanced interrogation had the support even of Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Congress. And to put frosting on the cake, he is pushing Obama and Holder to get on with closing Guantanamo and bring the terrorists onto mainland American soil.

Clearly, the attempt to sneak Cole past the Senate was carefully planned to coincide with the afterglow of Barack Rambo Obama taking personal credit for killing Osama bin Laden. Republican Senators have a longer attention span than Obama and Reid gave them credit for. They also have a problem understanding how it's perfectly "legal" to shoot the leader of Al Qaeda in the face when he was unarmed, but illegal and immoral to waterboard terrorists who are likely to have important information about imminent attacks on America and Americans. A dull-normal sixth-grader can see the massive illogic in that. John M. Cole can't.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) specifically pointed to an article written by Cole for The Legal Times in which Cole likened the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks to the Oklahoma City bombing. Timothy McVeigh was a demented criminal American citizen who committed a horrendous act on his home soil. The 9/11 terrorists and the detainees at Guantanamo were and are conducting a war on America with no civilized restraints. But Cole sees no difference between the two.

Perhaps the better analogy would be that Holder and Cole are Siamese twins, joined at the brain. Holder as a private citizen pushed other lawyers and law firms out of the way to get the honor of defending shoe-bomber Jose Padilla. He claims that proves that civilian trials work because Padilla was convicted. In actuality, it proves he's a publicity-hound who wanted to defend terrorists for personal gain. And the fact that Padilla was convicted is due at least in part to the fact that Holder is a lousy lawyer. Cole has a very similar record.

Both Holder and Cole previously denied that the Commander-in-Chief has the constitutional authority to determine the rules of the battlefield. It's not clear if they believe that constitutional concept still applies, but they strongly support at least one Commander-in-Chief who is presently doing exactly that (as he should). Congress has supported, enabled and funded the President's right to do so for George W. Bush and Barack Hussein Obama. Court challenges to the Authorization for the Use of Military Force Act (AUMF) have been summarily rejected by every court which has addressed the issue (even the leftist Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals).

The Act reads, in pertinent part: "The President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons." Holder and Cole pay lip service to the Act, but have had a problem with what to do with "common criminal" Khalid Sheikh Muhammed and a few others.

Cole has justified the shooting of the unarmed bin Laden as being the same thing as the U. S. military assassination of Admiral Yamamoto in World War II. Holder asserts that it is lawful "to target an enemy commander in the field." Cole signed onto the Attorney General's opinion which further asserted "by my estimation and the estimation of the Justice Department (including Cole), bin Laden was a lawful military target, and the operation was conducted consistent with our law and values. There was no indication that he [bin Laden] wanted to surrender."

As I'm sure you all know, I don't have a problem in the world with the SEALs summarily ridding the world of a sneaky, cowardly engineer of mass murder committed on American soil. But Holder and Cole feel the need to justify the killing on shaky legal grounds. Bin Laden wasn't on a battlefield nor was he an enemy commander in the field. He was trapped in a civilian compound on the soil of a nominal ally. That's fine by me, but it seems to trouble Holder and Cole enough to require lame legal reasoning to justify it.

Obama will, thanks to Reid's parliamentary expertise, get one more bite at this apple before Cole's recess appointment expires. I don't see much likelihood that Cole will be confirmed by the Senate given Republican strength and fear among Democrats that they will be seen as soft on terrorism. But then I told everyone I knew that there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell that Obama would get socialized medicine past a reluctant Congress. I might be missing something here.

12 comments:

AndrewPrice said...

Assisted in the prosecution of the Navy SEALS is enough for me to vote no. That shows a lack of judgment so extreme that he's disqualified from holding public office.

rlaWTX said...

[that snowball had a pretty good chance every winter in Hell, Michigan...]

I hope that you are right.
I agree with Andrew's summation.

stupid humans.

Unknown said...

Andrew: It seems pretty obvious to me too. So now all we have to do is to get sixty Senators to agree with us.

BevfromNYC said...

So Holder defended terrorists and now prosecutes (sort of) them? Why isn't he barred from making decision about terrorists? And why wouldn't that jeopardize Padilla's conviction?

Unknown said...

rlaWTX: The lefties consider Obama a messiah. I just see him as an evil sorcerer who keeps pulling off impossible magic tricks.

Unknown said...

Bev: It's arcane legal ethics. You can't prohibit a lawyer from "switching sides" so long as the cases and defendants are unrelated to a specific crime or "transaction." In fact, I went from defense attorney to prosecutor after deciding my guts wouldn't let me defend rapists and child-molestors. But I couldn't have anything to do with any case where a specific crime I had been counsel on or a specific client I had defended was involved. Think of it this way. Criminal defense lawyers defend criminals. But there is nothing to stop a previous defense attorney from becoming a prosecutor so long as he has no direct relationship to a particular crime committed by a particular defendant in the past. If he does have such a connection, he must recuse himself from that particular case, but not from criminal cases in general.

Holder and Cole represented terrorists. Now they [allegedly] prosecute them. But they are not prosecuting the same terrorists as they previously defended. And "terrorist" (like "criminal") is a description rather than an entity, so it's not like they previously represented IBM (an actual entity) and now represent people suing IBM.

Where I have a problem with Holder and Cole is that whereas I represented some pretty bad characters, I did it because I loved the law and believed deeply in the constitutional right of defendants to counsel. I almost never represented a client because I shared a common conviction with him or sympathized with his cause. Holder and Cole loved the money and seemed to have a distinct empathy for their clients and their clients' causes. That doesn't disqualify them from being prosecutors, but it does make them pretty lousy choices.

T-Rav said...

Unfortunately, I somehow suspect that Obama and Co. will find a way to keep Cole in place. Don't know how, but they've come up with enough legal trickery already to make me doubt they'll meekly submit to the will of our elected representatives.

Slightly OT, but related to their and others' attitude of treating Americans as criminals, why is it that a number of reporters and commentators insist on describing bin Laden's killing as "murder"?

Unknown said...

T_Rav: For the MSM, like Humpty Dumpty, words mean what they want them to mean, neither more nor less. Kill = murder, if it suits their purpose. For purposes of the far left, it's more convenient to call the killing of bin Laden "murder" since they don't think Americans should ever kill anybody, even in self-defense. The stealth-left in most of the MSM are still using "kill" because it serves their overall purpose of keeping their Messiah in place. But that could change overnight if it starts to look like Obama's defeat at the polls in 2012 is a slam-dunk. Then, while we look for our Ronald Reagan, they'll be looking for their George McGovern.

As for keeping Cole in place, I put nothing past this administration and Harry Reid's trickery in the Senate.

Tennessee Jed said...

James M. Cole ain't no merry old soul. Both of these clones are a disgrace, and need to go just as soon as possible. Then again, maybe it's just me. Perhaps I'm asking too much for the justice department to merely uphold the law. I know too that I am certainly biased towards the military and against liberal partisans in power with an axe to grind.

Unknown said...

Tennessee: The kangaroos are in charge of the courts. It's a frightening prospect. Obama is busy putting us into second-rate international status, and his attorney general is busy turning us into a banana republic that prosecutes its political enemies and imagined enemies. The only enemies they are reluctant to pursue and prosecute are the real ones--foreign and domestic.

StanH said...

Typically despicable, by these harebrained radicals, come on 2012.

Unknown said...

Stan: It can't come soon enough for me.

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