Obama’s Latest Radical Lawyer
FrontPageMag.com reports that President Barack Obama recently named Dawn Johnsen as his choice for Assistant Attorney General to the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).
A 1986 graduate of Yale Law School, Johnsen arrives in Washington with impeccable leftist credentials. From 1987-88 she served as a staff counsel fellow for the ACLU, an organization that routinely has defended the rights of terrorists, illegal aliens, and enemies of America generally. For the ensuing five years, she was employed by the National Abortion & Reproductive Rights Action League (now known as NARAL Pro-Choice America).
From there, she went on to serve in the Clinton Justice Department from 1993-98. And today she is a national board member of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, which aggressively recruits and indoctrinates young law students and helps them rise to positions of power within the legal system—in an effort to drag all of American jurisprudence ever-farther to the political left.
Johnsen’s views on a wide range of issues mirror Obama’s. This is particularly true of her deeply felt sense that America is a nation with a great deal for which to apologize.
She considers America to be a nation rife with injustice, especially in the form of racial discrimination against nonwhites. In an April 2008 article in Slate, Johnsen lamented that “the U.S. incarcerates more of its people—and for longer periods—than any other nation, bar none.”
There was just one problem with Johnsen’s righteous scolding about racism in the justice system: the charge wasn’t true. The research on these issues is now clear: race is not a factor that influences arrest rates, prosecution rates, conviction rates, or the severity of sentences—not even with regard to crack and powder cocaine, the example Johnsen cites specifically.
In a 2008 article Johnsen condemned “Bush administration abuses,” she characterized the war on terror as an ill-advised overreaction to a single act of terrorism (9/11), rather than as a long-overdue response to years of jihadist provocations (including such incidents as the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole).
She has called waterboarding torture. This is the procedure that saved thousands of lives by extracting information from Khalid Sheik Mohammad on a planned attack on Los Angeles.
She plans to use the Justice Department’s Environmental & Natural Resource Division to press the issue of climate change. And most alarmingly she embraces a broad-based “progressive agenda” that advocates “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.”
Throughout her professional career, Johnsen has displayed a rigid intolerance for opinions contrary to her own. For example, she believes that nominees for the federal judiciary should automatically be disqualified from consideration if they subscribe to the concept of Constitutional originalism—as opposed to the notion that the Constitution is a malleable “living document” whose meaning can be molded to fit the preferences of activist judges.
Then there is the matter of abortion. Johnsen unequivocally supports the notion that all women in the United States should have a right to abortion-on-demand at any point in their pregnancies, for any reason whatsoever. This is a moral decision that Johnsen has a perfect right to make. But she also believes that taxpayers, and not the women having the abortions, should be forced to pay for them. Thus Johnson decried the Hyde Amendment of 1976—which permitted abortion but prohibited federal funding of the procedure—as a “callous” and “discriminatory” measure that disproportionately harmed low-income women. Not surprisingly, the ACLU and NARAL took precisely the same position.
Characterizing women with unwanted pregnancies as “the inevitable losers in the contraceptive lottery” who “no more ‘consent’ to pregnancy than pedestrians ‘consent’ to being struck by drunk drivers,” Johnsen further contended that any restrictions on taxpayer-funded abortions had the effect of “reduc[ing] pregnant women to no more than fetal containers.” Without government-provided abortion counseling to give them “proper information about contraception,” she added, women simply “cannot be said to have a meaningful opportunity to avoid pregnancy.”
Four years later, Johnsen penned another amicus brief in the Supreme Court case Bray v. Alexandria Women’s Health Clinic, where she characterized the efforts of anti-abortion petitioners as “terrorist” behavior that was “remarkably similar to the conspiracy of violence and intimidation carried out by the Ku Klux Klan.”
In Johnsen’s view, no judicial nominee should be eligible to serve on the federal bench unless he or she openly and unequivocally abjures any and all restrictions on access to taxpayer-funded abortion.
Dawn Johnsen is, in short, a political activist. The fact that she has been appointed to a post that calls for dispassionate legal analysis should be of immense concern to all Americans.
John Perazzo is the Managing Editor of DiscoverTheNetworks and is the author of The Myths That Divide Us: How Lies Have Poisoned American Race Relations.
Scary! She sounds a bit like Madalyn Murray O’Hair!
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