Who Is Harold Koh And Why Did The Worst Of The GOP Obstructionists In The Senate Try To Kill His Nomination?

Yesterday the Senate passed a cloture motion to close down the Republican Party kneejerk filibuster to Obama's nomination of former Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh to become the State Department's Legal Advisor. Looking for an excuse to vote against him, neocons and reactionaries who dominate what's left of the diminishing Republican caucus claimed that his "transnational" approach to the law was unacceptable. Don't worry if you don't know what that means; neither do they. The dean of Republican foreign policy senators, Richard Lugar (R-IN), ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, led 8 mainstream conservatives across the aisle to vote with all the Democrats (and even Lieberman) to give Obama a hefty 65-31 victory.

The nay votes are pretty much the same obstructionist clowns who oppose everything Obama has tried to do-- from neo-Confederate America-haters like Richard Burr (R-NC), Jim Bunning (R-KY), Johnny Isakson (R-GA), David Diapers Vitter (R-LA), Jeff Sessions (KKK-AL) and Jim DeMint (R-SC) to the bloodlust caucus members like John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), John Cornyn (R-TX) and Tom Coburn (R-OK). It's a pretty clear signpost of how future obstructionist attacks against the president's agenda are likely to play out-- although Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln actually voted with the Democrats on this one.

The obstructionists are threatening to exercise their right to use all 30 hours of floor debate before permitting a final vote, so Koh may not be formally confirmed for another day.

AND NOW, SAYS KEN, IF THAT SACK OF POOP

RAHM EMANUEL WOULD GET OFF HIS BUTT . . .

. . . and help Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid develop some, er, incentives to help Senate Dems understand that playtime is over, and it's time, for starters, for them to make sure that every damned appointee by a president of their own party is confirmed -- that no, when it comes to staffing the administration, nobody gives a hooha what the doody-brained prima donnas think -- maybe we could get the wheels of government chugging a bit more efficiently. At the same time, of course, every effort should be made, as in the case of the Koh nomination, to encourage Senate Republicans who don't want to be written off permanently as hopeless mental defectives to start using their itty-bitty brains.

A nice place to start would be with maybe the best of all the Obama appointments: Dawn Johnsen to head the Justice Dept's Office of Legal Counsel, so desperately in need of resurrection after the depradations of the Bush-Cheney-Ashcroft-Gonzales years. The last I heard, the Johnsen nomination was languishing, over hardcore wingnut resistance, with a mere 57 "yea" votes. Have we really reached the point where a nominee of such outstanding credentials is going to be "rejected" because she can "only" muster 57 votes?

(Unless, of course, in Rahmworld they'd just as soon not know what exactly the law is, the primary job of the OLC? Is it possible that Master Rahm would rather have, say, somebody like despicable OLC alum John Yoo running the shop?)

It's a disgrace, and some senators need to be made to understand that their "leader" and the White House have ways of making them wish they'd never been born, or at least chosen a more stable career.

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