I wonder if the Gray Lady really thinks this helps – its notoriously extreme-Leftist editorial page gushing praise for this “superbly qualified” nominee who has “fought for just the sort of change” the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel needs. I guess we’ll see — Johnsen has been approved by the Judiciary Committee on a party line vote. Now it’s on to the full senate where she’ll effectively need 60 votes to get confirmed. After eight years of watching stellar conservative judicial and Justice Department nominees torched by slanderous, disciplined, unmovable Democrat resistance, we’ll have to watch closely how Republicans and supposedly moderate Democrats — who, until now, have rolled over for Obama’s checkered nominees — will deal with a true radical slated to fill what must be DOJ’s most non-ideological post.

I won’t rehearse the whole controversy over Johnsen’s argument that abortion restrictions are analogous to a violation of the 13th Amendment’s prohibition on slavery — an argument she first denied having made and then, after her words were quoted back to her, insisted was not an “argument” (notwithstanding its appearance in a brief to the Supreme Court seeking to have abortion restrictions struck down). What’s most amusing about today’s Times paean is its claim that Johnsen is the needed antidote to the Bush OLC’s “lawless expansion of executive power” because she’s “called for the office [of legal counsel] to be more transparent and to show greater respect for Congress and the courts.” In this, the Times studiously ignores Johnsen’s previous tenure at OLC — and ignores the Clinton years in general.

This is from the profile of Johnsen I wrote for NR a few weeks back:

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.”

Now, imagine what the Left would say — imagine what Johnsen would say — about a Republican lawyer who contended that the president is above every law enacted by Congress unless Congress has expressly stated that the law in question applies to the president. As it happens, Johnsen’s stated theory is correct — in fact, congressional statutes cannot limit the president’s constitutional prerogatives regardless of whether they expressly attempt to do so.

But the salient point is that Johnsen, like the Times, has no problem in principle with the expansion of executive power as long as that expansion is in service of Democrat presidents and of what Johnsen has called “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.” It is the use of executive power by Republicans in furtherance of American interests and American national security that rankles her.