No, it’s the same old Dawn . . . Johnsen, that is. At Politico, Jost Gerstein reports that the president’s nominee to lead the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has once again been favorably passed on to the full Senate by the Judiciary Committee. The vote was 12–7, along party lines.

As we’re reminded of by Ed Whelan’s characteristically thorough analysis of Goodwin Liu, whom Obama wants to place on the 9th Circuit (start with this Bench Memo and scroll down), it is hard to grasp and keep up with how radical many of this administration’s appointees are. But Ms. Johnsen stands out, and not just because of her abortion extremism (it was she who argued, in a Supreme Court brief, that abortion restrictions were tantamount to violations of the Constitution’s prohibition against slavery), or even because of her unabashed commitment to using the law to further what she calls “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.”

She also stands out because of the position for which she has been nominated. DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel is the last place in government where we would want a hard-edged ideologue — and while that would be true at any time, it is especially true with the current Justice Department, which is political to a fare thee well. And with DOJ already rife with lawyers who volunteered their services to America’s enemies, do we really want OLC to be run by a lawyer who wrote that one of the Obama administration’s first orders of business should be to “order an immediate review to determine which detainees should be released and which transferred to secure facilities in the United States” for civilian trials?

Here is a profile of Johnsen I wrote last year, and here is my article about her denial, during her confrimation hearing, that she made the Thirteenth Amendment argument that appears in the Supreme Court brief she filed when she was director of NARAL.

One would think the Senate debate and, perhaps, filibuster on Johnsen’s nomination would be the occasion for pressing the Justice Department to tell us more about the extent to which American counterterrorism policy is now being made by lawyers who chose to represent the al-Qaeda detainees.