Mukasey's Moment

Editorial of The New York Sun
September 7, 2007

Here's one thing on which we agree with Senator Schumer: Michael Mukasey, the former chief judge of the federal courthouse in Manhattan, would make a fine attorney general. The Senator, early on in his hunt for Alberto Gonzales' scalp, endorsed Judge Mukasey as a good candidate for the job. He urged the White House to nominate "somebody who, by their reputation and career, shows that they put the rule of law first, a person like a Michael Mukasey, a person like a Larry Thompson, a person like a Jim Comey."

Judge Mukasey doesn't much need Senator Schumer, or us for that matter, to commend him for the country's top law enforcement position. From a long career on the bench, Mr. Mukasey is as trial-tested as any judge in this country. He is a tested federal prosecutor. The last politician he relied on for his livelihood was President Reagan, who in 1987 nominated him to a spot on the bench. And he has shown a great fidelity to the abiding principles that Madison and the other authors of the Constitution laid down for our Republic.

Judge Mukasey could have sat on the federal bench for the rest of his life, but he chose to go back into private practice. In a recent dispatch in the Wall Street Journal, he made it clear that he has been thinking strategically in respect of the most important issues facing Mr. Bush's war cabinet. Judge Mukasey presided over the largest terrorism trial in America's history — the case of the blind sheik and his nine collaborators who plotted to blow up landmarks across New York City, including the United Nations.

In the case of Jose Padilla, Judge Mukasey upheld the president's authority to detain an American as an enemy combatant but insisted the miscreant have access to a lawyer. In Judge Mukasey's view, our criminal justice system is intended for "routine criminals who pursue finite goals," he wrote in his piece in the Journal. He reckons the civilian justice system is inadequate to "protect a society that must gather information about, and at least incapacitate, people who have cosmic goals that they are intent on achieving by cataclysmic means."

Mapping out the executive's authority to detain terror suspects without trial, and what protections those suspects have to challenge their detention, is an area where it could be argued that Mr. Bush was less well-served than he might have been had he had someone like Judge Mukasey at the head of the Justice Department. Judge Mukasey, unlike previous attorneys general, has urged Congress to, as he put it in the Journal, "fix a strained and mismatched legal system, before another cataclysm calls forth from the people demands for hastier and harsher results."

When it comes to politics, Judge Mukasey is no shrinking violet. When he left the bench, he jumped right into Mayor Giuliani's campaign for the presidency, which speaks well of both Judge Mukasey and the former mayor. It is no small thing that such an individual could win the endorsement of a senator like Mr. Schumer, who has taken such a hostile stance toward the administration and the Republicans in general. If Mr. Bush passes over Judge Mukasey, Mayor Giuliani, should he become president, would be unlikely to make the same mistake.

Mukasey's Moment

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