Sneaky little devils they are. This just makes them look crappier if that is possible. I wonder how Paulose is liking her babysitter. I think the House and Senate could be investigating this for a very long time.

Oh, Paulose wasn’t Regent U. She got her JD from Yale.

Just because she’s from Yale doesn’t mean she was/is qualified. I think it’s safe to assume everyone, everyone Bush has ever appointed to ANYTHING is a worthless slack-jawed nincompoop.

Yale Law, huh? Another proud graduate. Bush, Negroponte, Paulose.
Damn fine school.

But it makes me wonder…are women allowed in Skull and Crossbones or Crosshairs or whatever they call it?

Is a color guard and choir required for induction into the secret society?

Really, I want to know. I’m not some conspiracy nut. Well…a little bit…

I don’t get this at all. The Senate confirmed her unanimously, even though the Republicans did an end-run around the Judiciary Committee? Is that how it went down? Because that’s just absurd. Not one damn Senator stepped up and called bullshit here? â€We’ve secretly switched the Democratic cloakroom’s coffee to decaf. Let’s see what happens.â€

All Congressional procedures are an outrage. We’ve just been conditioned to think they are normal.

Is it normal that our democratic process is so byzantine that no ordinary person can hope to understand what they are watching on C-SPAN? Why should debates and votes be so dependent upon bizarre and arcane rules?

Why isn’t there a requirement that every bill and every amendment be published on the internet for a full two weeks before there is a vote on such (at a time and date known in advance)?

It is common sense in our day and age, with the technology at hand.

The procedures make no sense. But they are accepted as normal, and never questioned in any penetrating way — even in academia.

So don’t wonder why Paulose got through. Ordinary process.

Paulose is not the scandal. The whole process is the scandal.

I don’t think we had C-SPAN before the GOoPers got control of Congress.

That’s incorrect. Tip O’Neill had the C-SPAN cameras pan an empty House chamber in 1984.

http://www.time.com/time/magaz…..90,00.html

jwp. Good point, never thought of that. Oversite by the public. Love it.

Look at Iowa too. Civil Rights Division to US Attorney. I suspect that Iowa was mentioned in redacted bits of the DOJ dumps.

Frank,

You stated above:

The Senate confirmed her unanimously, even though the Republicans did an end-run around the Judiciary Committee? Is that how it went down? Because that’s just absurd. Not one damn Senator stepped up and called bullshit here?

Look. That was the last day of the Senate that the Republicans were running, that was Frist’s last day on the job, and that was the last day of the do-less-than-nothing Republican term. They had tons of stuff that had to be passed to just keep the government working, and clearly they slipped some political garbage like the Rachal Paulose confirmation in there.

There is no telling how many things they slipped in that day, and since the Democrats were not in the leadership they had little or no data on what was happening. There was too much being â€expedited†out of necessity. Very likely, the Democratic Senators who are competent were slipping their own priority stuff into the mass and had no time to watch over anyone else’s shoulder.

If someone were to really want to see a can of smelly worms, they just might start reviewing all the legislation passed after the Thanksgiving break in 2006. In fact, it might be fun to get Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to put it all on the internet and let the TPM Rangers have a go at reviewing all of it, piece by piece. As they have been proving with the DoJ document dumps, that is an ideal use of the internet in governance.

There was no more possiblity that anyone would have spotted this one piece of garbage as the Republicans pushed it through than there is of my winning the Mega-ball lottery. (I didn’t.) Catching such crap is the reason the Senate and House are organized into committees in the first place, and this was specifically removed from the committee system at the last second.

Cut the Democrats some slack and put the blame where it belongs – on the Republicans. They held all the levers in early December.

Another interesting aspect is how a pretty obscure (and I think another last minute slip-in) in the Patriot Act may factor in to the Paulose case: waiver of the residency requirement (http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/013541.php) and flakiness on her publicly posted resume (http://www.mncampaignreport.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=389)

I actually like the obscure rules and proceedures. Much of it is about not letting bad things happen, or about using leverage to build your interest into a compromise from a position of weakness. Those who really master the rules (Senator Byrd) are as much artists as anything else. (I know, I know, developed taste.)

Anyhow, that lame duck session was something strange. First of all, many Republicans were in shock given their loss of the majority in the election. Bye bye committee chairmanships, K-Street Money and Jobs were chaseing after Democrats, Many Republicans were gradually coming to understand the electorate had slapped down all things Bush, Cheney and Rove. Put simply, the mood was ugly.

Mark Dayton (D)had decided not to run for a 2nd term, so the Paulose matter came at the last minute of his term. Mark was trying to wind up the things he had been working on for several years — and the information on Paulose was dumped on him at the last minute. I am not aware that anyone locally flagged him on this — someone needs to figure out whether someone contacted one of his staffers, and whether information was passed on when this confirmation came up at the last minute.

Norm Coleman’s role is also difficult to interpret. He clearly was more in the loop as to what was going on, but the election had been a real shocker for him, and it is in that context one should review. He has never become particularly popular here — his win in 2002 after the Wellstone Plane Crash has always put him under a cloud as an accidental Senator — but in November 2006, the DFL candidate had defeated the right wing Republican by 20 points, outraised the Republican money machine, and gotten virtually all the Independent and Moderate Republican votes for Amy Klobuchar — and Coleman is up for re-election in 2008. Since November Coleman has not been a happy camper. His approval numbers have dropped to about 46% from a previous mid 50’s, and the Republican State Party is firmly in the hands of the Christian Coalition types — the Michelle Bachman supporters, and Paulose is clearly out of that party faction. My guess is that Coleman did nothing vis a vis the USA because as things have worked out, he is politically dependent on that party faction — and will be until some leadership shows up to take back the Republican Party and haul it into the mainstream again. Remember, Coleman is a former conservative DFL’er, Co-Chaired Clinton’s state campaigns in 92 and 96, and was recruited to change parties by a mix of people — yes, Karl Rove, but also the old money people who traditionally dominated the Republican Party, and his best buddy in the Senate is Joe Lieberman. In December, 2006 that was hardly a position of strength if you were looking at a re-election campaign in 2008 against a well known Wellstonian named Al Franken.

(By the Way — Franken is going to be on Larry King tonight, might be of some interest.)

Anyhow, I assume Norm â€went along†because Paulose is a chit for the only faction in the MN Republican Party that is still semi-loyal and organized, the Christian Coalition gang behind Bachman.

In recent days, Senator Amy Klobuchar has been given to tight little comments on the art of managing a Prosecutor’s office — she was Hennepin County Attorney for three terms prior to running for the Senate — so popular she ran unopposed. She is not on Judiciary, rather on Ag and Environment — so she is totally focused on coordinating the building of a major Alternative Energy Policy. That leaves Coleman sitting out in the bleachers with â€his†USA and her office mess…and Coleman apparently does not have the Clout to address the problem. And since the Heffelfinger Family is at the core of the Old Money, Respectable, Republican Moderates (now voting DFL) crowd — his position is not really all that great.

This is why Senate Judic should not approve any appointments for any jobs in DOJ, or any judgships, until the WH starts coming clean. If that means no one passes, so be it. And no recesses until the end of the year, so no recess appointments either.

EW, there are a couple of local blogs deep into the Paulose Story, which I’ve been checking. I recommend Norweginity, and Minnesota Monitor — but there are others too. My own guess is that Norm supported the interium appointment prior to election, assuming that the R’s would keep control of the Senate, and the list he apparently sent to the WH and DOJ would have been consulted for a regular appointment, and would easily come out of Judiciary. But as we know from Barbara Boxer — Elections have consequences. Apparently Norm has somewhat continued Wellstone’s practice of having a local committee review appointment possibilities when a vacancy exists — and do some preliminary vetting, and they had produced a list for Coleman. The WH was uninterested in his list.

News at noon today. A more moderate Republican has been found to run for State Chair — election in June, to run against the current chair, out of the Bachman School of Republicanism and Theocracy. Since the choice will be made by the State Central Committee selected in 2006 that nominated Kennedy and Bachman, I would not bet money on change right now, but the announcement promises a fight for more moderation and competence so we’ll see. Coleman immediately announced he would support the current chair. The only way the Republicans can change is to have a fight at the Precinct Caucus level, move the ultra conservatives out and find moderate Republicans willing to run for Party Offices. Given that the Christian Coalitionists have been insulting them with eliminationist rhetoric for 20 years, that will be a hard sell. But if the moderate reformers are serious, this is the route they have to travel. Last fall they lost a US House Seat, an open Senate Seat, two Constitutional Officers statewide, four State Senate Seats, and I think it is 18 State House Seats. One does have to ask about their winning strategy at some point. The Paulose matter just makes their situation more ugly. If Norm now fails to support the far right State Chair, he would probably be looking at a challenge either at State Convention or in a primary — which is why he wrote Paulose a letter telling her to clean up her office administration (hardly her real problem) — and getting under the bed covers should anyone mention the fight for State Party Chair.

I wonder if other Republican State Parties are having similar fights? Is this just Minnesota, or a much more generalized condition? It seems this sort of thing did happen in Colorado over the past couple of years — and for different reasons it looks like Nevada and Kentucky have major problems. In Minnesota and Colorado I think it is the unnatural marriage of traditional (business) Republicanism with the hard right ideologues that is coming apart — but I don’t know about other places.

I think they did the same thing in 2005. Another nominee with no prosecutorial experience but great political connections

From White House Web page
Catherine L. Hanaway
Position: Missouri – E
US Attorneys (94) Department of Justice
Status: Appointed
Date Nomination Sent to the Senate: April 28, 2005
Date of Confirmation by the Senate: December 27, 2005