Dawn of the Left

Obama’s pick to head the Office of Legal Counsel reveals the president’s radicalism.

By Kathryn Jean Lopez
Monday, March 30, 2009

If you still think that President Barack Obama is about hope and change and moms and apple pie and nothing objectionable or radical, consider his nominee for the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Dawn Johnsen.

Her record sets off many alarm bells. Some of them have to do with her views on abortion. Regardless of what the New York Times might say — they called her position on abortion “hardly unusual” in a recent glowing endorsement — you’d have to be doing a tour of women’s-studies courses to find a lot of people who agree with her that pregnancy is slavery.

Johnsen is former legal director of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (now known as NARAL Pro-Choice America in the hopes of fooling people). While there, in a case involving a Missouri law that limited the use of taxpayer money and state resources for abortion, Johnsen called restrictions on abortion “involuntary servitude,” arguing that with them, “the state has conscripted [an expectant mother’s] body for its own ends.” This is, she wrote, “forced pregnancy,” which is a violation of the Thirteenth Amendment, the anti-slavery amendment. Pregnancy, she declared, “requires a woman to provide continuous physical service to the fetus in order to further the state’s asserted interest” in the unborn child. She argued that a mother “is constantly aware for nine months that her body is not her own.”

That’s not unusual? It’s not unusual for her to be admired and endorsed by the president of the United States?

At the very least, it’s highly partisan, which presents a big problem. The little-known but highly influential position of heading the OLC requires serving as an “administration’s lawyer’s lawyer.” As former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy explained the job in a recent piece for National Review on Johnsen, “It authoritatively interprets the law for the attorney general and, in doing so, drives administration legal policy.” It’s the most unideological post there is in a presidential administration. Which is why Johnsen should be the last person filling it. Besides her radically anti-life past, there’s also her record with the Clinton administration (where she served in — surprise — the Office of Legal Counsel), a résumé that suggests she’s anything but the breath of fresh air that President Obama has promised.

McCarthy, in his case against Johnsen, recounted her OLC record, one that the New York Times, for one, chose to overlook. McCarthy exposed the “particularly rich” hypocrisy of Johnsen’s recent condemnations of the Bush administration’s use of executive authority, showing how she ardently defended Clinton’s will to power when his administration did such things as “[invent] extraordinary rendition, [detain] Cuban refugees without trial at Guantanamo Bay, [conduct] warrantless national-security searches, and [attack] a foreign country without congressional authorization.”

It’s abundantly clear that a Republican nominee with Johnsen’s past would be roundly thrashed by the pundits and the public (probably unfairly and slanderously so, if recent history is any indication). Instead, led by the lefty cheerleaders at the Gray Lady, we’re engaged in a bout of knee-jerk Bush-bashing, while important questions such as who Johnsen is and what she’s said and done go unexamined.

If the Obama administration aims to de-politicize the Justice Department, as it claims, in selecting Johnsen it has picked an ideologue who would do just the opposite. (On her priority list: making sure that candidates for Bush-era DOJ positions who were passed over for leaning left get “special consideration” in the Obama administration.)

Johnsen’s nomination has been moved out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on a party-line vote and awaits a full-Senate test. She’ll need 60 votes to get confirmed. Remembering the circus foisted upon so many George W. Bush nominees, it’s hard to believe that Republicans and moderate Democrats will let her sail through to the OLC. Or so we have the audacity to hope.

The un-radicalism of the Obama administration is an untruth. And Johnsen’s place in line to fill an important seat there plays a significant role in exposing the “moderate Obama” myth that many Americans have bought into — most recently the Catholic University of Notre Dame, which is providing the president cover for his anti-life radicalism by having him speak at its commencement this May.

Senators should take a close look at this one. It’s their job.