Sen. Charles Schumer tries to justify his support of attorney general nominee Michael B, McKasey , but his rationalizations ring hollow.

My colleagues who oppose his confirmation have gone out of their way to praise his character and qualifications. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, for one, commended Judge Mukasey as “a brilliant lawyer, a distinguished jurist and by all accounts a good man.”

Yeah, and good men never make bad decisions either, do they? Nor do they support the idea of a unitary executive.

. . . Judge Mukasey has demonstrated his fidelity to the rule of law, saying that if he believed the president were violating the law he would resign.

Schumer thinks this is what an attorney general should do? Resign? If the president breaks the law he would just pack up his marbles and go home? Sound principles there.

I deeply oppose this administration’s opaque policy on the use of torture — its refusal to reveal what forms of interrogation it considers acceptable. In particular, I believe that the cruel and inhumane technique of waterboarding is not only repugnant but also illegal under current laws and conventions. I also support Congress’s efforts to pass additional measures that would explicitly ban this and other forms of torture. I voted for Senator Ted Kennedy’s anti-torture amendment in 2006 and am a co-sponsor of his similar bill in this Congress.

Judge Mukasey’s refusal to state that waterboarding is illegal was unsatisfactory to me and many other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. But Congress is now considering — and I hope we will soon pass — a law that would explicitly ban the use of waterboarding and other abusive interrogation techniques. And I am confident that Judge Mukasey would enforce that law.

On Friday, he personally made clear to me that if the law were in place, the president would have no legal authority to ignore it — not even under some theory of inherent authority granted by Article II of the Constitution, as Vice President Cheney might argue. Nor would the president be able to evade a clear pronouncement on the subject from the courts. Judge Mukasey also pledged to enforce such a law.

From a Bush nominee, this is no small commitment. In many aspects, Judge Mukasey reminds me of Jim Comey, a former deputy attorney general in the Bush administration who has been widely praised for his independence; he did not always agree with us on the issues, but was willing to fight administration officials when he thought they were wrong.

Even without the proposed law in place, Judge Mukasey would be more likely than a caretaker attorney general to find on his own that waterboarding and other techniques are illegal. Indeed, his written answers to our questions have demonstrated more openness to ending the practices we abhor than either of this president’s previous attorney general nominees have had.

[Yawn]

Sorry, Chuck, torture is torture, and Mukasey knows this. He's playing with the Senate, and with you. But you know this, don't you. What are you getting out of this deal?