By Richard A. Serrano
The Los Angeles Times
Tuesday 28 August 2007
The acting attorney general, a longtime Republican, vigorously defends Bush's war on terrorism and limitations on due process.
Washington - Two summers ago, Paul D. Clement stood before a federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., defending the Bush administration's much-maligned policy of indefinitely holding "enemy combatants" in this country as part of the government's war on terrorism.
The case involved American-born Jose Padilla. Clement, just one month into his new job as U.S. solicitor general, argued that people like Padilla were trying to bring jihad home to this country - even if they were U.S. citizens and did not wear enemy uniforms.
Judge J. Michael Luttig stopped him. "Those accusations don't get you very far," the judge said, "unless you're prepared to boldly say the United States is a battlefield in the war on terror."
Clement did not miss a beat. "I can say that," he said, "and I can say it boldly."
Named Monday as the acting U.S. attorney general to temporarily succeed Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales, Clement is likely to closely follow the principles of his predecessors - Gonzales and former Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft. Like them, he has embraced the White House's mandate of waging war on terrorists in this country, even if it means diverging from longtime legal precepts of due process. He strongly believes in supporting case statutes and administration policy, whatever the consequences.
"Your job is to marshal the best argument for the defense of the statute or the policy that gets the job done," he said in an interview with Legal Times in 2004. "That's the way I approach all the cases."
His supporters, including Washington lawyer Carter G. Phillips, see Clement as bright and hard-working, a steady hand to settle the uneasiness of Gonzales' tenure, marked by the furor over the abrupt firing of a number of prosecutors. "Institutionally, there's no awkwardness" with Clement, Phillips said.
But detractors see Clement, a longtime Republican who donated to Bush's 2004 reelection campaign and has given to the Republican National Committee, as just another hard-right conservative unwilling to consider the other side.
"Paul Clement's views are in lock step with this administration," said Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice, an association of liberal advocacy groups. "He has been a vigorous advocate for this administration's expansive view of executive power, turning back the clock on civil and women's rights, as well as denying due process protections to detainees."
Clement, 41, was born in Cedarburg, Wis., a Milwaukee suburb. His father was an accountant.
His first verbal battles were on the high school debate team. He earned a bachelor's degree in international affairs at Georgetown University, a master's degree in economics from Cambridge University, and a law degree from Harvard Law School, where he was the editor for the Supreme Court section of the law review.
He is married and has three sons.
He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and federal appellate Judge Laurence H. Silberman, both Reagan appointees. After working in private practice and teaching law at Georgetown, Clement joined the Justice Department in 2001 in its solicitor general's office. He applied for a federal appellate judgeship in 2003 but was passed over.
He has argued for Bush policies on several key enemy-combatant cases such as Padilla's - all touchstones on the administration's domestic war against terrorism. He also handled appellate arguments before the trial last year of Zacarias Moussaoui, who pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison as a Sept. 11 collaborator.
Clement's adversary in that case was Frank W. Dunham Jr., one of Moussaoui's lead attorneys, who died last year. "I felt he did an excellent job," Dunham once wryly noted. "He can make the unreasonable sound reasonable."
Meet the (Temporary) New Attorney General
By Spencer Ackerman
Talking Points Memo
Monday 27 August 2007
Paul Clement, the solicitor-general of the United States, will step in as acting attorney general when Alberto Gonzales finishes boxing up his memories on September 17. (You know, the ones he told the Senate he didn't have.) Clement isn't likely to stay in office very long, as President Bush intends to appoint a permanent replacement for Gonzales, but for an unspecified amount of time, Clement will be the nation's chief law enforcement official. (The acting attorney general can remain in office for up to 210 days starting from the departure of his Senate-confirmed predecessor, Mike Allen reports; but this is, to say the least, unlikely.) So that raises the question: Who is Paul Clement, anyway?
You might say he's ... a conservative. Primarily a legal scholar an attorney in private practice, Clement clerked for two of the most conservative judges in the country, Lawrence Silberman of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. He came to the solicitor-general's office in 2001 as the deputy SG on the strength of serving on John Aschroft's Senate staff, and for helping construct the winning argument in Bush v. Gore. It was something of a consolation prize: Ashcroft unsuccessfully tried to make Clement chief of the Office of Legal Counsel, but was blocked when the White House backed Jay Bybee for the position.
According to a 2004 Legal Times profile, Clement's consistent conservatism hasn't stopped him from winning the respect of his ideological opposites:
Indeed, in D.C.'s clubby Supreme Court Bar, where reputations are built over a lifetime, Clement seems to have achieved remarkably early success. "He's one of the best I've ever seen," says O'Melveny & Myers partner Walter Dellinger, who served as acting solicitor general from 1996 to 1997. "Whenever I think of an argument from Paul, the one word that springs to mind is clarity," Dellinger adds. "He has an extremely precise and clear intellect. Paul is never murky in thought or expression."
Indeed, at his Senate confirmation hearing in 2005 to become solicitor general, Clement received high praise from leading Bush-administration inquistor Russ Feingold (D-WI) for his "superb" 2003 defense of Feingold's campaign-finance reform before the Supreme Court. Feingold vouched for Clement's "professionalism and integrity" even when the two men disagreed.
One area where Feingold and Clement apparently diverge is on executive power. Clement's views of the president's wartime powers appear to be broad. He's argued that the administration can hold American citizens as enemy combatants, without guarantees of trial. (When asked by hyper-conservative Judge J. Michael Luttig if he really was prepared to say the U.S. is a "battlefield" in the war on terrorism, Clement replied, "I can say that, and I can say it boldly.") However, it's unclear whether he was assenting to such perspectives or merely representing his client, and his ex-colleagues haven't come to a consensus. Clement was understandably cagey in addressing the question in his Legal Times interview:
"If you've got a statute to defend, it doesn't much matter how you would have voted on the statute if you were a congressman. You're not," Clement says. "Your job is to marshal the best argument for the defense of the statute or the policy that gets the job done."
That means it's hard to know whether Clement would be inclined to stand up to President Bush in the event of a seeming abuse of power, as did a previous conservative acting AG, James Comey. Depending on how fast Bush can move his nominee through the confirmation process, Clement might not be around long enough to cast much of a shadow in the Justice Department. But with the Attorney General now given the power to, for instance, order up surveillance on foreign-to-domestic communications with a minimum of judicial oversight - and with the Senate looking for clear signs that the Gonzales Era at DOJ is over - Clement's independence, or lack thereof, may very well become his legacy, however abbreviated.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
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