Congress’ Selective Outrage Over Executive Power
Ed Morrisey, talking about the waterboarding issue and the Mukasey nomination:
...forcing an Attorney General to declare [waterboarding] illegal as the price of confirmation [as Democrats did during Mukasey’s hearings] functionally does the same thing as an explicit law outlawing waterboarding—only it shifts responsibility for legislation from Congress to the AG and basically forces him to make up laws as he goes along.
That’s a strange strategy for Congress to pursue, especially since they regularly pronounce themselves aghast at Bush’s ideas of executive power.
I, personally, maintain that waterboarding is not torture and that if it is effective in getting actionable intelligence that can save lives out of terrorist detainees (and there’s evidence to suggest that it is) we should absolutely be doing it. But, that point aside, it is 100% within the Constitutional province of Congress to make the decision as to whether or not our military uses that tactic.
That the Democrats in Congress, who are the ones making all the noise about this, would rather use the waterboarding issue as a political weapon against the Bush administration instead of just passing legislation to ban it is not really anything to do with the Bush administration itself.
