Chuck Schumer's Capitulation "Strategy"

Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein provided the decisive votes to make Mukasey the top law enforcement official in the land despite his testimony under oath that when George Bush tortures people it's not called torture, and his assertion that President Bush is allowed to break some laws if he wants.

The two idiot Senators accepted Mukasey's "assurance to enforce any law Congress might enact against waterboarding." Sadly for Schumer, Feinstein and the American people, Congress in 2005 already passed a law express forbidding waterboarding and other interrogation techniques amounting to torture. And President Bush already issued a signing statement declaring he would ignore it.

In December 2005, Congress passed and President Bush signed the Detainee Treatment Act, including the McCain amendment which barred "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment." President Bush then issued a signing statement for the law clarifying that when it comes to what constitutes "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees," the President proclaimed that he indeed would be the decider:

The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President, evidenced in Title X, of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.

In other words, "Nice law, Congress: Fuck you, I'm King."

Michael Mukasey's "torture is hypothetical" dodge during the confirmation process guarantees that the White House's regime of detainee torture put in place by Alberto Gonzales' secret memos, his own perjury to the Senate and President Bush's signing statement will continue uninterrupted. Senator Schumer's rationale for his vote today is, as Nixon spokesman Ron Nessen once pronounced, "no longer operative."

Democrats' public objections to Mukasey centered on whether water-boarding fit the definition of torture. Raising these objections allowed them to turn the Mukasey nomination into another flashpoint for rallying their base against the Bush Administration's conduct of the War on Terror, but their eventual capitulation also followed their pattern on this issue area: Raise a cry, attack the White House and then give the White House what it wants.

Sound the alarm. Talk tough. Capitulate.