Are Republicans Blackmailing Obama?

by Scott Horton

THE DAILY BEAST, April 10, 2009

If the president releases the Bush torture memos, Republicans are promising to “go nuclear” and filibuster his legal appointments. Scott Horton reports on a serious threat to Obama’s transparency.

Senate Republicans are now privately threatening to derail the confirmation of key Obama administration nominees for top legal positions by linking the votes to suppressing critical torture memos from the Bush era. A reliable Justice Department source advises me that Senate Republicans are planning to “go nuclear” over the nominations of Dawn Johnsen as chief of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice and Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh as State Department legal counsel if the torture documents are made public. The source says these threats are the principle reason for the Obama administration’s abrupt pullback last week from a commitment to release some of the documents. A Republican Senate source confirms the strategy. It now appears that Republicans are seeking an Obama commitment to safeguard the Bush administration’s darkest secrets in exchange for letting these nominations go forward.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-04-05/are-republicans-blackmailing-obama

[We know that the Republicans want the Prez to fail. But are these and other GOP actions a smoke screen or diversion to keep the Dems off balance and off message? The Dems are certainly off action in any effort to appear non-partisan. In any event, the Democrats were not given a mandate to serve GOP interests or to apprear non-partisan.]