Trusting Huck

by digby

I was just listening to old Huckleberry go on about turth and justice and the American way of torture. He says that all the analysts who say this bill is an abomination and an affront to everything we stand for are just wrong. We should believe him because he is a military lawyer and an expert on these issues. If you listen to the beltway wags you also know that he is a man of honor who courageously went against his president and insisted that we needed to ensure this legislation lived up to our ideals.

While listening to his soliloquy it occurred to me that this might be a good time to take a trip down memory lane and revisit one of Huckleberry’s finest moments:

How can the paper of record write a lengthy puff piece about the brave, maverick integrity of Senator Huckleberry Graham and make no metion of the fact that he and his pal Jon Kyl inserted a fraudulent 12,000 word colloquey into the congressional record to fool the US Supreme Court and were caught red-handed. The Supreme Court merely noted this in the footnotes of the Hamdan decision, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia issued an unusual order rejecting their amicus brief alone, although they accepted five others. As John Dean wrote: “No one familiar with this remarkable behavior by Graham and Kyl can doubt why the court did not want to hear from these senators.”

This was not a small thing. Huckleberry and Kyl wrote an entire script of a debate that never happened in order to create a false legislative history that they then cited in an amicus brief for the government in the Hamdan case. They defrauded the court and they did it with the express purpose of bolstering the government’s argument that the Senate had intended that the Supreme Court be stripped of jurisdiction in the Hamdan case.

This is remarkable not only because it features two Senators outright lying to the Supreme Court. It is also remarkable because the decision in that case is the one the NY Times says Huckleberry is now bravely defending against the wishes of his own party. I would have thought the reporter might have asked old Huck about where he actually stands on this issue.

This is the thing about Graham and why he is one of the most untrustworthy members of the Republican party. He is the guy who is out there portraying himself as the voice of reason, the man who thoughtfully entertains the whole range of opinion and settles on the reasonable middle ground. The truth is that he pretends to do all that while he ruthlessly advances the Republican agenda — even to the point where he would outright defraud the US Supreme Court while claiming to be a strict adherent to the rule of law.

This is the man whose intepretation of the torture and detention bill we are supposed to trust. He’s one of the men that congress trusted to do the kabuki “negotiation” with the president. Because he’s a man of integrity.

Update: This post by Vagabond Scholar gets deep into the weeds on Huckleberry’s rank dishonesty in this case, but it’s fascinating to read if you’re so inclined. He is an outright lying piece of garbage. He not only scripted a fake colloquy for the congressional record to fool the court into believing that the legislative intent was different than it actually was — he also wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post taking the other side. He should have been disbarred — and nobody should have ever trusted him anywhere near this issue again.

After his history it’s just a little bit difficult to believe he suddenly cares about the Geneva Conventions don’t you think?

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