Dems to Roll Over for Another Partisan Thug AG?

"White House officials have begun quietly circulating among key Senators a short list of potential replacements for outgoing Attorney General Alberto Gonzales," sayeth Roll Call today, "one that appears aimed at avoiding a lengthy confirmation fight with Senate Democrats, according to senior GOP and Democratic aides."

Avoiding a lengthy confirmation fight. If that's true, the Democratic Party is in far deeper trouble than we've ever imagined.

According to senior Republican and Democratic leadership aides, the White House has floated six potential replacements -- former Solicitor General Ted Olson; former Attorney General Bill Barr; former Deputy Attorney General George Terwilliger; D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Laurence Silberman; former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson; and Michael Mukasey, a former judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Ted Olson, as stanblather's diary reminded us last week, was a major figure in Richard Mellon Scaife's Arkansas Project, a prolonged series of "investigations" in the 1990s undertaken by the far right wing in an effort to dig up (or, failing that, make up) anything they could find--anything at all--that would destroy the reputation, or the presidency, of Bill Clinton. Bush's appointment of Olson to the office of Solicitor General in 2001 was perhaps the first of many, many hints that his campaign rhetoric about being "a uniter, not a divider" was fashioned out of a tissue of bitter, bitter lies; the Democrats' capitulation to the appointment on May 24, hours after Sen. Jim Jeffords defected from the GOP, launched their own long tradition of knuckling under to the administration on issues that really matter.

Laurence Silberman, a potential nominee to whom "members of both parties likely would be receptive," according to Roll Call, is perhaps an even more insidious possibility: he, too, appears at or near the center of many of the unethical and even illegal activities taken by the radical right wing in the 1980s and 1990s. Respected author and former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips said:

Silberman has been more involved with cover-ups in the Middle East than with any attempts to unravel them, [including] the "October Surprise" episode in 1980 in which the Republicans were later accused of colluding with the revolutionary government of Iran to keep 52 American hostages confined in Iran so that they could not be freed by the Jimmy Carter administration in time to influence the 1980 presidential election....[I]n 1980, as part of that year's Republican campaign, he attended at least one of the October Surprise meetings where an Iranian representative discussed what Iran would want in exchange for keeping the hostages.

Silberman was also one of the judges who pardoned Oliver North and John Poindexter on specious grounds in the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal--and later, he would become one of the judges who appointed latter-day Puritan nutjob Kenneth Starr to wage the war on president Clinton that would later lead to his unconstitutional impeachment. People for the American Way says that "Silberman has two standards of justice: one for his friends and ideological soul mates and another for those perceived as his enemies"--a charge that is well supported by the record.

"It's been acknowledged by most everyone that [Silberman] is one of the most partisan people in our community," Sen. Harry Reid said in 2004. Today, however, a senior Democratic leadership aide says that Silberman would "have a good chance of confirmation."

Our Democratic elected officials need to understand that we will not stand for yet another right-wing partisan thug in the attorney general's office.