Mukasey confirmed as attorney general in 53-40 Senate vote

WASHINGTON -- The Senate confirmed retired judge Michael Mukasey as attorney general Thursday night to replace Alberto Gonzales, who was forced from office in a scandal over his handling of the Justice Department.

President Bush thanked the Senate, even though the margin had been whittled down from nearly unanimous by a sharp debate over Mukasey's refusal to say whether the waterboarding interrogation technique is torture.

"He will be an outstanding attorney general," Bush said in a statement from his ranch in Crawford, Texas.

Republicans were solidly behind Bush' nominee. Democrats said their votes were not so much for Mukasey as they were for restoring a leader to a Justice Department left adrift after Gonzales' resignation in September.

In the end, Mukasey was confirmed as the nation's 81st attorney general by a 53-40 vote. Six Democrats and one independent joined Republicans in confirming him.

Democrats' choice

The choice, according to one of those Democrats, was essentially between "whether to confirm Michael Mukasey as the next attorney general or whether to leave the Department of Justice without a real leader for the next 14 months," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California.

"This is the only chance we have," she said, referring to Bush's threat to appoint an acting attorney general not subject to Senate confirmation.

But members of her own party didn't agree. Mukasey, his opponents argued, refused to say whether waterboarding is torture and put the onus on Congress to pass a law against the practice.

"This is like saying when somebody murders somebody with a a baseball bat and you say, 'We had a law against murder but we never mentioned baseball bats,"' said Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. "Murder is murder. Torture is torture."

Being better than Gonzales or an acting attorney general is not enough qualification for the job, said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass.

"The next attorney general must restore confidence in the rule of law," he said. "We cannot afford to take the judgment of an attorney general who either does not know torture when he sees it or is willing to look the other way."

The confirmation vote capped 10 months of scandal and resignations at the Justice Department. Mukasey's chief Democratic patron, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., drove the probe into the purge of nine federal prosecutors that helped push Gonzales out.

Waterboarding

The debate came after a tense day of negotiations that at one point featured Majority Leader Harry Reid threatening to postpone Mukasey's confirmation until December. His confirmation had long been certainty despite the debate over waterboarding.

Waterboarding, used by interrogators to make someone feel as if he is going to drown, is banned by domestic law and international treaties. But U.S. law applies to Pentagon personnel and not the CIA. The administration won't say whether it has allowed the agency's employees to use it against terror detainees.

"The United States will not be viewed kindly if we confirm as chief law enforcement officer of this country someone who is unwilling or unable to recognize torture when he sees it," said Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois.

, the Senate's No. 2 Democrat.

Mukasey has called waterboarding personally "repugnant," and in a letter to senators said he did not know enough about how it has been used to define it as torture. He also said he thought it would be irresponsible to discuss it since doing so could make interrogators and other government officials vulnerable to lawsuits.

"He felt that he could not make that pronouncement without placing people at risk to be sued or perhaps even criminally prosecuted," said Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Mukasey, who received a strong endorsement from Schumer, was the White House's first choice to replace Gonzales. Gonzales announced his resignation on Aug. 27, and the White House interviewed Mukasey the same day. Three weeks later, Bush introduced the 66-year-old Mukasey as "a tough but fair judge" and asked the Senate to confirm him quickly.

Mukasey, the former chief U.S. district judge in the Manhattan courthouse just blocks from ground zero, was first appointed to the bench in 1987 by President Reagan. He also worked for four years as a trial prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York's Southern District -- one of the Justice Department's busiest and highest-profile offices in the country.

Mukasey oversaw some of the nation's most significant terror trials in the years before and after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

He sentenced Omar Abdel Rahman, known as the "blind sheik," to life in prison for a plot to blow up New York City landmarks, and he signed in 2002 the material witness warrant that let the FBI arrest U.S. citizen Jose Padilla. That warrant marked the start of a case that wound its way through several federal courts as the government declared Padilla an enemy combatant and held him for 31/2 years before he was convicted last month on terrorism-related charges.

In an opinion article in The Wall Street Journal, Mukasey criticized U.S. national security law as too weak in some areas by noting that prosecutors are sometimes forced to reveal details of cases at the risk of tipping off terrorists. He is also a supporter of the government's anti-terror USA Patriot Act, wryly writing in 2004 that the "awkward name may very well be the worst thing about the statute."

Mukasey, a partner at New York-based law firm Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler, is also a close friend to former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Republican. He stepped down as an adviser to Giuliani's presidential campaign, on which he served as part of an advisory committee on judicial nominations.

Besides Schumer and Feinstein, Democrats voting to confirm Mukasey were: Sens. Evan Bayh of Indiana, Tom Carper of Delaware, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Ben Nelson of Nebraska. Of the Senate's two independents, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut voted for confirmation and Bernie Sanders of Vermont voted against.

Not voting were Democratic presidential candidates Joe Biden of Delaware, Hillary Clinton of New York, Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Barack Obama of Illinois. All four had said they opposed Mukasey's nomination.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain of Arizona also was absent, as were GOP Sens. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and John Cornyn of Texas.