Torture

With the end of Congress' 2009 term, all pending nominations were returned to the President as a matter of standard procedure. Now, eight of those nominations are once again set to be in the Senate's hands.

Steve Benen writes: 

Sam Stein reported that seven judicial and political appointees will be re-nominated by the president, including Dawn Johnsen, who was nominated in March to head the Office of Legal Counsel, but who can't get a floor vote, in part because conservatives disapprove of her opposition to Bush-era torture memos.

The re-nominations can't formally happen until the Senate returns on Jan. 20[.]

Of course, if the president really wanted to shake things up, he could use recess appointments and highlight their necessity in the face of a dysfunctional Senate process....

On a related note, ACS guest blogger Derek Duarte recently published "The Abuse of the Filibuster" on ACSblog here.

Seven months ago, the United States issued a list of human rights commitments and pledges in support of U.S. candidacy for membership in the U.N. Human Rights Council. The decision to join the Human Rights Council was the right thing to do. It was as an important step in breaking with the Bush administration's unilateral and disastrous policies on human rights. While we welcomed this move, we noted that the Obama administration had "missed an opportunity to detail exactly how it will reaffirm its commitment to ending human rights violations at home beyond vague rhetoric." We warned the Obama administration to "move beyond ambiguous commitments which are similar to the ones heard from the Bush administration over the past eight years."

There is no question that this administration is currently facing multiple and daunting challenges, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the safe closing of Guantánamo, the economic crisis and rising unemployment, health care, energy reform and much more. However, nearly a year after Obama's inauguration, the administration has yet to announce any major domestic human rights initiative, outline a detailed plan to honor and expand our existing human rights commitments and translate them into domestic policy, or incorporate them into the daily working of the U.S. government.