Whole flock of lawyers going over .. wow!
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The Romney campaign announced yesterday that ten members of the “Lawyers for Fred Thompson” group had joined the former Massachusetts governor’s campaign, including the Thompson group’s former national co-chair, Victoria Toensing, a former Reagan Justice Department official and prominent legal commentator.
Other Fred campaign refugees finding a new home with Romney were former Bush-Cheney lawyers Lizette D. Benedi, Rachel L. Brand, Reginald Brown, Viet D. Dinh, Noel J. Francisco, and Eileen J. O’Connor; former Reagan lawyers Charles J. Cooper and Joseph E. diGenova; and conservative law professor Michael R. Dimino.
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I had NO idea Victoria Toensing was a co-chair of Fred’s campaign. She’s a dynamite interviewee ... I never saw her on TV once! Why? And her husband, Joe DeGenova .. he’s great .. where was he? And why so little of Mary Matalin? I now really don’t understand what was going on there.
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MORE lawyers ...
http://unitaryexec.blogspot.com/2008/01/parsing-lawyers-for-fred.html
So what does Romney’s selection of legal advisers say about a future Romney presidency?
As an overall, it says that Romney would be a president who continued to push expansive presidential power, and certainly supporting the ideal of the unitary executive if not the ways the Bush presidency put the theory to practice.
And if Rudy Guiliani does not do well in Florida on Tuesday and drops out, it is clear his lawyers committee will flock to the Romney campaign, making his lawyers committee even more conservative than it already is. So who are these lawyers for Romney? Of note:
* Douglas Kmiec—Kmiec was an architect in the Reagan administration of the use of the signing statement to advance presidential power. Kmiec served in the Office of Legal Counsel in Reagan and Bush I, and has been a support of the unitary executive in its theoretical form.
Kmiec, who serves as a Co-Chair for Romney’s legal team, has not been a supporter of many of the actions the current Bush administration has taken in the name of the unitary executive. Kmiec fought those who called themselves unitarian but acted contrary to the Constitution even when he was an attorney in the Reagan Justice Department.
He found Reagan’s interpretation of language that was part of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 as a gross violation of the president’s executive powers.
* Charles Cooper—an attorney in the Office of Legal Counsel and in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice in the Reagan administration. He is also a proponent of the unitary executive theory and was involved in the ground floor of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization founded by a number of conservatives affiliated with the Reagan Justice Department.
* Viet Dinh—A member of the Bush Justice Department, serving under attorney general John Ashcroft. Dinh is an avowed conservative, involved in the 1990s in the Senate Whitewater Committee investigations into Clinton wrong doings from the Rose Law Firm, where Mrs. Clinton worked, to the death of Vince Foster, which continues to be the Mother of All Conspiracies among the Clinton-haters.
Dinh was also an architect of the PATRIOT Act, among other controversial Bush legal opinions, and thus is a proponent of allowing ideology to influence interpretation.
* Eugene Scalia, the son of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, served as the Solicitor of Labor under George W. Bush—one of Bush’s many recess appointees.
I am delighted with these developments. It means, I think, that Romney is talking to people who matter to me, and is convincing them. And these are not the first and they are not naifs.
You don’t take on a bunch like this and do a one eighty on them. These are serious folk.
* Viet Dinh—
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A serious conservative!!!!
I took a whole day and night off from politics and I am MUCH HAPPIER!