Questions For Cabinet Nominees ...

The President nominates members of his cabinet. After hearings, they are likely to be confirmed by the appropriate Senate committee and the Senate, itself. Denials of confirmation are rare, but they have occurred in recent memory. For various reasons, President Clinton did not win confirmation of his initial appointee for Attorney General, Zoe Baird; and President George H. W. Bush failed to win confirmation his initial appointments of a Secretary of Defense, former Senator John Tower of Texas, and a Secretary of Labor, Linda Chavez.

With the enhanced Republican majority in the United States Senate, it seems likely that President Bush's cabinet nominees will be confirmed. But the confirmation hearings are the place where legitimate questions need to be put to the appointees. Significant questions need to be put to two of them, at least:

1) Josh Cherniss at Sitting On A Fence commends this petition which asks Senators to question Alberto Gonzales closely about his role in advising President Bush to suspend the rules of the Geneva Convention in the torture of prisoners captured in Afghanistan and Iraq. With the admission of evidence obtained under torture in military courts, torture has become a routine part of American military procedure. Kieran Healy's"Freedom on the March" at Crooked Timber is a powerful challenge to this development. I am not assuaged by Orin Kerr's attempts to contextualize it at The Volokh Conspiracy. If H. Bruce Franklin is correct, we have merely routinized in American military operations abroad what is standard procedure in American prisons. And, yet; and, yet, what coursening of American values can justify the claim, in whatever context, of the current public affairs director of the libertarian Institute for Humane Studies:"If boiling people alive best served the interests of the American people, then it would neither be moral or immoral. It would just be grotesque, or indecent, or harsh. But since it doesn't have any strategic value, we don't boil people or nuke them." The Defense Department seems convinced that there is value in torture, even if it does stop just short of"boiling people alive." If these rulings stand, we will have no case in international law when our troops are taken captive and similarly treated. The America that I knew and loved knew quite clearly that it is not only grotesque and indecent; it is immoral. (Hat tip to David Beito at Liberty & Power.)

2) At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall lays out a chronology that raises serious questions that ought to be asked of Bernard Kerik, President Bush's nominee for Secretary of Homeland Security. No one seems to doubt Kerik's strength in the face of the tragedy in New York City on 9/11. It is his subsequent career about which Marshall raises questions. Sent into Iraq after the American invasion, Kerik was to have been responsible for the development of domestic security forces there. According to Marshall's chronology, Kerik was expected to remain in Iraq"in excess of six months." In fact, it was on his watch that the terrorist resistance to allied forces and the new regime in Iraq developed and Kerik returned to the United States within about three and a half months of his departure. Given his apparent failure to destroy incipient terrorism in Iraq, is Kerik the man to direct the Department of Homeland Security?

Gonzalez and Kerik may have persuasive answers to these questions, but no November"mandate" immunizes President Bush's nominees from facing very tough questions. Some of those questions go to the very heart and soul of who we are as a people and what we aspire to be.