Word: koh
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...battle began in late March, when Fox News firestarter Glenn Beck said Harold Koh, Obama's nominee to be the State Department's top lawyer, supported Muslim Shari'a Law. "Shari'a law over our Constitution!" Beck said in amazement. When that unlikely charge was debunked, Beck switched tacks and asserted that Koh, the outgoing dean of the Yale Law School and a former official under Presidents Reagan and Clinton, wanted to subjugate the U.S. Constitution to foreign...
...chasing melodrama, except that prominent members of the GOP, like Karl Rove and former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, began signing on to versions of Beck's critique. At that point conservative heavy hitters, including former Solicitor General Theodore Olson and Clinton tormenter Ken Starr, spoke up in favor of Koh. The dispute soon spread to the blogosphere, and Republicans across the country took sides, calling one another "fruitcakes" and "windbags." (Read "Glenn Beck: The Fears of a Clown...
...With a committee vote on Koh's controversial nomination coming Tuesday, both camps are lobbying Senators in what has become a proxy fight for the Republican Party's approach to life in political exile. On one side are Koh's opponents, who want to harness Beck's populist appeal to stay on the offensive for a variety of causes. On the other are Koh's supporters, who want to retrench around sober messages of lower taxes, smaller government and American supremacy, and wait for public opinion to swing back in their favor. "Koh is just a surrogate" for that fight...
...traditionalists defend Koh's character. Former Senator John Danforth wrote the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he was "puzzled and distressed that various media personalities and interest groups have tried to tarnish" Koh, whom he called "well within the mainstream of American legal thinkers." Olson called Koh "a brilliant scholar and a man of great integrity," and Starr said he "embraces, deeply, a vision of the goodness of America...
...activists who have emerged to draw on Beck's following have a variety of agendas. One group opposes most U.S. treaty involvement. Koh wants to put U.S. courts, the President and Congress under "a system of rulers who are these élite of transnational lawyers who are completely unaccountable to American citizens," says Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who has appeared on Beck's program...