A Busy Day for the Senate Judiciary Committee

As my new colleague Peter Spiro has already noted, this morning the Senate Judiciary Committee is holding hearings to discuss how Congress should respond to last week’s decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and its invalidation of the Bush Administration’s military commissions program. Ironically, this afternoon, the Committee will get a chance to hear from one of the architects of that program. At 2:15 this afternoon, the Committee will take up the nomination of William Haynes, currently the General Counsel of the Defense Department, to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. Haynes has been looking to move into the judiciary for some time; he was first nominated for the 4th Circuit in 2003, but Senate Democrats filibustered his nomination because of Haynes involvement in setting up the legal framework for treating detainees outside the Geneva Conventions construct. So, after a morning talking about how to fix the Guantanamo mess, it will be interesting to see how the Senators treat one of the key people responsible for its creation (not to mention his involvement in supporting detainee treatment methods that many consider torture, some of which have now been repudiated by the Justice Department).

I expect Haynes to face hostility from both sides of the aisle, although undoubtedly the Democrats will be more vocal in their criticism. At the same time, I hope we get a chance to hear Haynes’ own take on Hamdan and whether he would do things differently in hindsight, or if, like John Yoo, he remains unrepentant over the propriety of Administration programs and activities.