Thoughts on policy, history, faith, baseball when I get around to it, waterfowl, and life in general by a junior attorney who'd much rather have Jonah Goldberg's job. Or possibly Darin Erstad's.

 
Apparently, Democratic Senate Majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV), in his continuing scorched-earth campaign against a number of President Bush's judicial nominees, has made a weasely reference to the contents of one of the nominees' confidential FBI files.

There are serious consequences for disclosing the contents of those confidential files (including being booted from the Senate), so Reid didn't actually say what was in the nominee's file -- only that there was a "problem" with it.

That's incredibly chickens**. The insinuation can't be refuted, or defended against, or put in context without knowing what's in the file. Senator Reid is essentially asking us to take his word for it that whatever is in the nominee's file is sufficiently bad as to disqualify the nominee. He's not the most credible judge of this, obviously, being on a crusade as he is to sink those nominees that won't advance a liberal agenda in the courts.

One thing that annoyed me in the article linked to was the statement by a former Republican staffer that "Harry Reid is a disgrace to the Senate and to [his] Church of Latter-day Saints." That last bit is totally irrelevant (and misstates the name of the Church). Sure, Harry Reid is a jerk. And, as it happens, this particular variety of his jerkery has a bit of a Mormon touch to it in his using confidentiality considerations to prevent an accused from defending himself. But for Pete's sake, who accuses Ted Kennedy of being a bad Catholic, or Olympia Snowe of being a bad whatever-the-heck-she-is? Mormons seem to get held, not necessarily to a higher standard, but certainly to a standard that takes their faith into consideration. Ideally, Mormon politicians wouldn't have so much attention paid to their religion. posted by Thomas at 11:07 AM