Word: counseling
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Late on April 9, amid a flurry of news over the retirements of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and Congressman Bart Stupak, the White House quietly backed down from a yearlong battle with Republicans, announcing that Dawn Johnsen, President Obama's pick to lead the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, had withdrawn her nomination. The timing, some observers noted, was not accidental...
...wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, it was the Office of Legal Counsel that generated the legal memos justifying enhanced interrogation techniques, which some critics prefer to call torture. Johnsen, who headed the office on an interim basis during the Clinton Administration, did not mince words with respect to those memos and the Administration that generated them. Rather, she spoke openly and critically about what she saw as the excesses of the Bush lawyers. Writing in a blog post three years ago, for example, she decried the "shockingly flawed content" of one of the memos, writing that it encouraged...
...recess appointment, which some liberals urged, was out of the question, according to the White House official. Such an appointment sidestepping an up-or-down floor vote would have made Johnsen's goal to depoliticize the Office of Legal Counsel impossible "and would have led to partisan debates over its legal opinions regardless of their quality," the official says...
Some liberals who hoped Johnsen would be Obama's tonic to the office under Bush are bitterly disappointed by her withdrawal, and some accuse the White House of not backing their own candidate. But Lee Casey, a Washington attorney who was an attorney adviser in the Office of Legal Counsel in 1992 and 1993, says her nomination may have been abandoned because of a bigger confirmation fight that is now taking shape: the one for Justice Stevens' seat. "My guess is that it became a question of where do we want to spend the political capital," he says...
...region over which greens have been fighting oil companies for years. "Today's announcement is unfortunately all too typical of what we have seen so far from President Obama - promises of change, a year of deliberation, and ultimately, adoption of flawed and outdated Bush policies," said Brendan Cummings, senior counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the more radical green groups. "Short of sending Sarah Palin back to Alaska to personally club polar bear cubs to death, the Obama Administration could not have come up with a more efficient extinction plan for the polar bear...