Lawyer’s Lawyer, Radical’s Radical
Meet Obama DOJ nominee Dawn Johnsen
ANDREW McCARTHY
March 9, 2009
http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=YzcyODUwNjAwNzg3YTYyZjBiOWU3ZTQwZmYzOGIwOGQ=
Pregnancy provokes a welter of feelings, physical and emotional. But does anyone really
think of pregnancy as slavery? Apparently so: Indiana University law professor Dawn Johnsen, Pres. Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
Yale-educated and ACLU-trained, Johnsen already has done one tour of duty at OLC. She spent nearly six years there during the Clinton administration (1993–98), the last two as acting chief. OLC, a critically important agency, is the administration’s lawyers’ lawyer. Staffed by graduates of top law schools who are then polished by elite judicial clerkships, it authoritatively interprets the law for the attorney general and, in doing so, drives administration legal policy. OLC’s credibility is derived from its reputation for apolitical, academic discipline — its commitment to informing policymakers of what the law is, rather than what staffers believe the law should be. Johnsen is, for that reason, a poor fit: She is an ideologue, and an unabashed one.
Her bizarre equation of pregnancy and slavery was not an off-the-cuff remark. It was her considered position in a 1989 brief filed in the Supreme Court. At the time, she was legal director of NARAL (then the National Abortion Rights Action League, since renamed NARAL Pro-Choice America). The case, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, involved a Missouri law that did not ban abortion but restricted the use of state funds and resources for abortions. It’s an obvious distinction, but one without a difference — at least according to Johnsen. Any restriction that makes abortion less accessible is, in her view, tantamount to “involuntary servitude” because it “requires a woman to provide continuous physical service to the fetus in order to further the state’s asserted interest [in the life of the unborn].” In effect, a woman “is constantly aware for nine months that her body is not her own: the state has conscripted her body for its own ends.” Such “forced pregnancy,” she contends, violates the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibits slavery.
The Court rejected this farcical theory, just as it has rejected other instantiations of Johnsen’s extremism. On abortion and other issues dear to the Left, she is nothing short of a zealot. She insisted that, without government-provided abortion counseling, a large number of women would be left without “proper information about contraception.” This, she claimed, would mean they “cannot be said to have a meaningful opportunity to avoid pregnancy.” The usual rejoinder to such reasoning is that nobody is forcing these women to have sex. Johnsen sees it differently, writing that these “losers in the contraceptive lottery no more ‘consent’ to pregnancy than pedestrians ‘consent’ to being struck by drunk drivers.”
In reputable private law offices and U.S. attorney’s offices throughout the country, adult supervision would prevent such a lunatic analogy from finding its way into a letter to a lower-court judge, much less into a Supreme Court brief. Obama, however, is proposing that Johnsen be the adult supervision at Justice. He would fill a position calling for dispassionate rigor with a crusader for whom strident excess is habitual.
[snip]
Particularly rich is Johnsen’s diatribe against Bush’s purportedly outlandish claim of power to ignore statutes that encroach on executive authority. When Johnsen served in the Clinton administration (which invented extraordinary rendition, detained Cuban refugees without trial at Guantanamo Bay, conducted warrantless national-security searches, and attacked a foreign country without congressional authorization), OLC’s official position was that “the President has enhanced responsibility to resist unconstitutional provisions that encroach upon the constitutional powers of the Presidency.” The office opined that several statutes (including privacy provisions in the federal wiretap law) could not bind the president, and Johnsen herself authored a 1997 OLC opinion concluding that presidents were above consumer-credit-disclosure laws. In that case, she broadly asserted that “statutes that do not expressly apply to the President must be construed as not applying to him if such application would involve a possible conflict with his constitutional prerogatives.”
A parallel hypocrisy is illustrated by Johnsen’s rants about how the Bush administration “politicized” the Justice Department. Her solution to this problem: Politicize the Justice Department. She argues that job applicants who may have been passed over by the Bush administration for holding leftist political views should get “special consideration” in DOJ hiring but, at the same time, maintains that nominees for the federal judiciary should be rejected out of hand if they embrace constitutional originalism or are members of the judicially conservative Federalist Society. Johnsen would also press the DOJ to advance the leftist agenda by having its Environment and Natural Resource Division “pursue innovative litigation and policy initiatives, such as the pressing issue of climate change.”
Johnsen’s attraction for Obama is obvious. The principal target of her Webster brief was the settled principle that the Constitution’s recognition of various fundamental rights (and the judicial invention of such “rights” as abortion) does not confer an entitlement to governmental aid to exercise those rights. For Johnsen, this is anathema, the denial of “economic justice” and thus of equal protection. “Economic justice,” a favorite Obama phrase, is the Left’s euphemism for the “redistributive change” Obama criticized the radical Warren Court for failing to embrace. Rather than the hoary construction of the Constitution as “a charter of negative liberties,” one that says only what government “can’t do to you,” Obama urges a new bill of rights defining what government “must do on your behalf.”
Read the rest HERE
ADD THIS:
Excerpts from: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2386
Born in Manhasset, New York in August 1961, Dawn Elizabeth Johnsen earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and political science at Yale College in 1983. Three years later, she earned a J.D. at Yale Law School. After completing her higher education, Johnsen clerked for U.S. Appeals Court Judge Richard Dickson from September 1986 until August 1987. She then served as a staff counsel fellow for the American Civil Liberties Union from 1987-1988, and worked for the National Abortion & Reproductive Rights Action League (now known as NARAL Pro-Choice America) from 1988-1993. Next, President Bill Clinton named Johnsen as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General from 1993-1996, and as an Acting Assistant Attorney General heading the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) from 1997-1998. In 1998 Johnsen left her government post and joined the faculty at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law. Today she is a national board member of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy.
Along with such notables as David Cole, Harold Koh, Noah Feldman, and Cass Sunstein, Johnsen was a contributor to the 2009 book The Constitution in 2020, wherein she wrote:
“Progressives must not portray all abortions as tragedies … Senator Hillary Clinton, in a 2005 speech commendable for setting forth a pro-choice, pro-prevention, pro-family agenda, took the aspiration a step in the wrong direction when she called for policy changes so that abortion ‘does not ever have to be exercised or only in very rare circumstances.’”
Johnsen views the United States generally as a nation rife with all manner of injustice, including racial discrimination against nonwhites. In an April 2008 article which she penned for Slate, Johnsen lamented that “the U.S. incarcerates more of its people — and for longer periods — than any other nation, bar none.” Most disturbing, she said, was “the devastatingly disproportionate rates of imprisonment of racial minorities.” This inequity, she explained, was in large measure a result of “how we treat drugs: the crack/cocaine disparity and beyond that, the fact that African Americans face disproportionately higher rates of arrest, prosecution, and conviction and disproportionately longer sentences.” “And those disparities,” Johnsen added, “… translate to amazingly high rates of African Americans who subsequently are prohibited from voting, unable to find jobs, ineligible for student loans … the ramifications go on and on and on.”
Following his victory in the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama named Johnsen as his choice for Assistant Attorney General to the Office of Legal Counsel. Shortly thereafter, Johnsen stated that Justice Department job applicants whom the Bush administration previously had rejected because of their leftist political views should now receive “special consideration” in the Obama Justice Department’s hiring standards.
Moreover, Johnsen opined that nominees for the federal judiciary should automatically be disqualified from consideration if they subscribe to the concept of Constitutional originalism (as opposed to the notion that the Constitution is a malleable “living document”), or if they belong to the judicially conservative Federalist Society.
Johnsen further announced her intent to exhort the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resource Division to “pursue innovative litigation and policy initiatives, such as the pressing issue of climate change.”
Though the OLC post is, by definition, apolitical, Johnsen openly asserts her support for “the progressive agenda” of “universal health care, public funding for childcare, paid family leave, and … the full range of economic justice issues, from the minimum wage to taxation policy to financial support for struggling families.”
Read the FULL ARTICLE HERE
ANOTHER GEORGE SOROS CONNECTION HERE:
Dawn Johnsen is a national board member of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy.
American Constitution Society for Law and Policy (ACS)
ACS was officially co-founded by Walter E. Dellinger III (who served as Bill Clinton‘s Solicitor General in 1996-97) and Peter J. Rubin (a Georgetown law professor who was counsel to Al Gore in the two Supreme Court cases involving the Florida presidential recount controversy in 2000). Dellinger and Rubin launched ACS on July 30, 2001, with the stated goal of countering the influence of the Federalist Society, whose conservative views were allegedly corrupting young minds in law schools from coast to coast.
ACS operates on a yearly budget of several million dollars, a portion of which is used to publish a journal and to organize working groups that produce white papers on various topics related to the law. Several foundations have contributed large sums of money to ACS, most notably the Streisand Foundation, the Deer Creek Foundation, the Ford Foundation, George Soros‘ Open Society Institute, the Overbrook Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
ACS aggressively recruits and indoctrinates young law students, with the ultimate objective of helping them rise to positions of power within the legal system—and thereby dragging all of American jurisprudence further to the political left.
<“font-family: Arial;”>One tactic by means of which ACS effectively influences the minds of law students and young attorneys is to give them first-hand exposure to the passionately articulated agendas of America’s leading leftists. Toward that end, ACS conventions typically feature high-profile guest speakers like Eric Holder, Ralph Nader, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Russ Feingold, Tom Harkin, Ted Kennedy, John Edwards, Sherrod Brown, Tammy Baldwin, Rosa DeLauro, Jesse Jackson Jr., John Lewis, Jan Schakowsky, Al Gore, Senator Chuck Schumer, Rep. Barney Frank, former Attorney General Janet Reno, former Assistant Attorney General Bill Lann Lee, Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree, and communist icon Angela Davis.
When addressing ACS audiences, these speakers commonly engage in inflammatory rhetoric aimed at stoking the passions of the left. At an ACS event on June 24, 2004, for instance, Al Gore likened President George W. Bush to the Roman dictator Julius Caesar and accused Republicans of monitoring the Internet with “digital Brown Shirts” prepared to ambush any journalist who dared to criticize America’s war effort in Iraq. He accused President Bush of authorizing “what plainly amounts to the torture of prisoners,” and of labeling “any law or treaty” which “attempts to constrain his treatment of prisoners in time of war” as “a violation of the Constitution.” Gore further accused the President of asserting “that he has the inherent power … to launch an invasion of any nation on Earth, at any time he chooses, for any reason he wishes, even if that nation poses no imminent threat to the United States.” And he said that Bush had declared himself “no longer subject to the rule of law so long as he is acting in his role as Commander in Chief.”
In its Mission Statement, ACS laments that “[i]n recent years, an activist conservative legal movement has gained influence—eroding [the] enduring values” of “individual rights and liberties, genuine equality, access to justice, democracy and the rule of law.”
While condemning what it calls “judicial activism” by conservative judges, ACS in fact encourages judicial activism by the left. To cultivate such a spirit, the organization has initiated a working group under the heading “Constitutional Interpretation and Change,” which seeks to “debunk” the “neutral-sounding theories of … originalism and strict construction” that “ideological conservatives” purportedly have used to smear “judges with whom they disagree as judicial activists who make up law instead of interpreting it.” This working group is part of ACS’s “The Constitution in the 21st Century” project, which aims “to promote positive, much-needed change in our legal and policy landscape,” “to formulate and advance a progressive vision of our Constitution and laws,” and “to popularize progressive ideas through papers, conferences and media outreach.”
Read the rest HERE
Then THIS:
A letter penned to
March 22, 2009
Dear Seymour,
The Obama Administration’s roll-out of Department of Justice appointments has been like a greatest hits parade of abortion advocates.
The latest pro-abortion lawyer to go before the Senate for confirmation is the worst yet.
Write to your Senators today and tell them to oppose Dawn Johnsen’s nomination to be Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel.
While it comes as no surprise that President Obama would nominate administration officials who share his pro-abortion beliefs, it is shocking that he would nominate someone as radical as Dawn Johnsen.
Here is a just a short list of Dawn Johnsen’s pro-abortion record.
– Dawn Johnsen has worked for the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project and she was the legal director for the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL).
– Johnsen has compared pregnancy to slavery. In 1989, she wrote that abortion restrictions such as the partial-birth abortion ban and parental notification laws result in “forced pregnancies,”which she claimed amounts to “involuntary servitude.”
– She has argued that the government should strip the Catholic Church and other religious denominations of their tax exempt status because of their pro-life advocacy.
– She was heavily involved in the authorship of the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), which would repeal every state and federal restriction on abortion and further enshrine abortion as the law of the land.
– In a paper given to mark the 35th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, she said the first priority of the progressive agenda was to “focus on the courts as the vehicle of desired change.”
The Office of Legal Counsel advises the federal government on how to interpret policy, law, and regulations in light of the Constitution. In other words, Dawn Johnsen will determine the legal course of the entire government.
Marjorie Dannenfelser
Susan B. Anthony List President
http://ukthunder.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=politics&thread=27318&page=1
Why is it that the far-leftists’ agenda always includes a connection to George Soros?
Is Soros the puppetmaster for a One World society that follows the Soros Doctrine?
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