Dawn Johnsen for U.S. Office of Legal Counsel?

For reference, the New York Times has a big story on President Barack Obama's legal appointments, "Storm Clouds Gather Over Obama Nominees." The piece focuses on David F. Hamilton, who's a federal appeals court nominee, and Dawn Johnsen, who's nominated to lead the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department.

Putting Hamilton aside for now, it turns out that Johnsen's a radical ideologue. Kathryn Jean Lopez has a piece on this, "Dawn of the Left: Obama’s pick to head the Office of Legal Counsel reveals the president’s radicalism":

If you still think that President Barack Obama is about hope and change and moms and apple pie and nothing objectionable or radical, consider his nominee for the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Dawn Johnsen.

Her record sets off many alarm bells. Some of them have to do with her views on abortion. Regardless of what the New York Times might say — they called her position on abortion “hardly unusual” in a recent glowing endorsement — you’d have to be doing a tour of women’s-studies courses to find a lot of people who agree with her that pregnancy is slavery.

Read the whole thing here.

But see Johnsen's entry at "Discover the Networks":

Throughout her legal career, Johnsen has consistently opposed any regulations that would infringe upon a woman's right to undergo a taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand at any stage of pregnancy, for any reason whatsoever. For example, she opposes 24-hour waiting periods before abortions can be performed; she rejects parental-consent requirements for minors; and she rejects laws against the procedure commonly known as partial-birth abortion.

In a 2006 op-ed piece opposing Samuel Alito's confirmation as a Supreme Court Justice, Johnsen declared that no judicial nominee should be eligible to serve on the federal bench unless he or she abjured any and all restrictions on access to abortion. "The notion of legal restrictions as some kind of reasonable 'compromise' -- perhaps to help make abortion 'safe, legal, and rare,'" she wrote, "proves nonsensical."

Along with such notables as David Cole, Harold Koh, Noah Feldman, and Cass Sunstein, Johnsen was a contributor to the 2009 book The Constitution in 2020, wherein she wrote:

"Progressives must not portray all abortions as tragedies ... Senator Hillary Clinton, in a 2005 speech commendable for setting forth a pro-choice, pro-prevention, pro-family agenda, took the aspiration a step in the wrong direction when she called for policy changes so that abortion 'does not ever have to be exercised or only in very rare circumstances.'"

Johnsen views the United States generally as a nation rife with all manner of injustice, including racial discrimination against nonwhites. In an April 2008 article which she penned for Slate, Johnsen lamented that "the U.S. incarcerates more of its people -- and for longer periods -- than any other nation, bar none." Most disturbing, she said, was "the devastatingly disproportionate rates of imprisonment of racial minorities." This inequity, she explained, was in large measure a result of "how we treat drugs: the crack/cocaine disparity and beyond that, the fact that African Americans face disproportionately higher rates of arrest, prosecution, and conviction and disproportionately longer sentences." "And those disparities," Johnsen added, "… translate to amazingly high rates of African Americans who subsequently are prohibited from voting, unable to find jobs, ineligible for student loans ... the ramifications go on and on and on."

Dawn Johnsen for U.S. Office of Legal Counsel? Brought to you by President Infanticide.