By appointing people like Marty Lederman and Dawn Johnsen to OLC, and then pursuing policies that seem the opposite of what they advocated (or appeared to advocate), Obama has, not entirely by accident, also at best silenced them and at worst co-opted them. Johnsen is doubly under wraps in that she hasn’t been confirmed yet — in some ways as scandalous as Franken’s continued absence in the Senate. Obama has pulled out the stops for a “two inches and a cloud of dust” hair-splitter like Sotomayor, but there’s been no news about Johnsen since mid-May.

That makes it all the more disappointing that the Balkinization crew — especially Balkin himself, but also others — haven’t been on the ramparts about a developing executive branch consensus that appears to okay lawbreaking in the past and undermines rule of law in the future. I can only suppose that’s due to what you’re talking about and some reluctance to appear to “call out” Lederman.

What’s the difference? A Dem, that’s the difference.

I think you nailed it Thomas.

Unless someone else steps up, Greenwald is probably going to be the best resource if and when Obama comes out with a concrete proposal for detaining without trial.

@Nell:
sorry: Not a problem — I’ll fix the code so the italics end at “office”, if that’s OK; De Palma: can one selectively ban a single commenter with the blogspot comment system? In the Pakistani case, the lawyers are an important constituency of the long-suppressed secular, democratizing political parties: Well, maybe we’ll catch up with them in fifteen or twenty years — long-suppressed, democratizing, etc.

Thanks for the emptywheel/bmaz pointer. Guess I’ll go there more often. Wheeler tends to get immersed in the case details down in the weeds, which can be good of course, but is also difficult to get a big picture with — or to follow if you haven’t been there in the weeds too from the start.

PS: thanks for the shout-out about my Obama-Cheney post in your comment at Obsidian Wings.

I should have previewed.

It’s often overlooked and perhaps not widely known, but the exact issue over which the lawyers rose up was the participation of Pakistani security services in seizing people, holding them secretly, and torturing them.

In the Pakistani case, the lawyers are an important constituency of the long-suppressed secular, democratizing political parties. Here, the liberal lawyers appear to believe that things will be fine because their “team” is in office.

What’s mystifying is why they of all people don’t seem concerned about what a future administration can and will do with the Constitution-corrupting framework Obama appears to want to preserve and extend.

On the other hand, I haven’t even checked in since a few weeks after Marty Lederman left, when the tendency was already in evidence for every other poster than Brian Tamahana.

It’s too bad, because we could use some more lawyer bloggers explaining things to us NALs. Bmaz at Emptywheel can be helpful that way at times. You don’t have to wait for a relevant post, just ask a question (with ‘OT’ at the beginning) in the very active EW comments and he or one of the other lawyer commenters will often get around to it or point you in a helpful direction.

SCOTUSblog has also been a lifesaver, but for obvious reasons are not a resource for things happening below the SC level.