Isn’t it ironic that Democrats bend over backward to canonize James Comey, Jack Goldsmith, and now Daniel Levin as The Men Who Said No to the President, while voting to confirm a man who determinedly tells the president, “Maybe”? Maybe we like our heroes to be brave only after the laws have been broken. In the interim we want them to keep an open mind.

What Levin, Goldsmith, and Comey did—what made them so “independent”—was not to change decades of settled law into unsettled law. That’s not independence; it’s lawlessness. What they did is what Mukasey pointedly refuses to do: draw a line around a certain class of conduct and deem it off-limits. Confronted with undeniable evidence of the suffering that water-boarding causes, and the many laws it violates, Mukasey declined to say “never.”

That’s why Feinstein’s supposedly elegant solution—hey, let’s pass legislation that makes that illegal water-boarding really, really illegal—seems so naive at this late date. Is she hoping that this time the president will be persuaded that we really, really mean it?

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