Surprise: Obama nominee for Office of Legal Counsel withdraws

We didn’t write much about her but lefty bloggers wrote plenty, and they shall not be pleased to learn that an ardent opponent of Bush’s counterterror apparatus somehow isn’t fit for high-level government work. With Justice Stevens and Stupak owning the weekend headlines, the timing for the White House was finally right:

Ms. Johnsen, an Indiana University professor, was a strident critic of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies and the legal theories used to create them.

Those views and her past work for a group that supports abortion rights led stiff opposition from Republicans and some Democrats. The opponents made sure she never got a final Senate confirmation vote, although she was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee…

Ms. Johnsen was nominated in early 2009 and quickly became a top target of conservative opposition. President Barack Obama renominated her earlier this year. But an early indication of her fate came last month when the president issued recess appointments for 15 nominees to circumvent Senate opposition, and Ms. Johnsen wasn’t among them.

An administration official said a recess appointment of Ms. Johnsen wouldn’t have accomplished the administration’s aim of trying to depoliticize the Office of Legal Counsel.

For background on her views, see Powerline’s lengthy post written shortly after she was nominated. This will be blamed on GOP obstructionism, of course, but I vaguely recall Democrats having a filibuster-proof majority last year which they could have used to ram through any nominee they pleased. Johnsen was nominated, as noted in the Journal piece, in early 2009, long before Scott Brown was a gleam in conservative America’s eye. Nice to know that the Blue Dogs will stand their ground on terrorism policy, if not health care. The One’s decision not to use a recess appointment on her is more intriguing, though. Did he decline to do it because he can’t afford to give the GOP any extra ammunition on national security ahead of the midterms? Or did he do it because, without much media fanfare, he’s using the same war powers that Bush was hammered for using, capped by the power to assassinate American citizens like jihadbot cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi? The Office of Legal Counsel is the president’s legal department, and the same office that John Yoo and Jay Bybee worked for when they drafted the torture memos to guide CIA interrogations. Johnsen, in that role, could have been quite a thorn in Obama’s side in trying to rein in his options on counterterrorism. What seemed to him like a smart appointment in early 2009 may have seemed less smart after 15 months of playing with Bush’s intel machinery. Maybe that’s why she was never confirmed — because Obama eventually didn’t want her to be.