Is it time

[candy331]

to require that a candidate running for office has to name the potential members of his cabinet before election? I know that this would be hard but the reason I ask is that people vote for that person placing their confidence and hopes in him/her but have no idea who the appointments will be which might make the candidate unacceptale by these choices. For instance Arnold brings Pete Wilson, David Drier, Susan Estrich etc etc, Bush brings not only Cheney but Rumsfeld Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams etc. etc. Do you think people would take a second look if they knew who was going in these cabinets?

[maha]

1. Probably not.

Hmm, well, as a rule there's a lot of behind-the-scenes negotiating going on before cabinet members are named publicly. It may be that candidate X would love to name person Y as his secretary of state, but maybe Y doesn't WANT to be secretary of state. And I don't think many people would commit to being cabinet appointees until after the nomination is made.

[my_2_cents]

2. He appointed a Federalist Society member of Bush's cabinet to his team

Viet Dinh is with the Federalist Society which means the ultra-conservative group will have a hand in policy regarding workers rights, environmental protections ( the Federalist society on a national level challenged the federal EPA,) the appointment of right wing judges to the California bench.

This most likely means the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute will have MUCH broader input on California law and economics than they would have had otherwise. Look for them to defund unions by putting RIGHT TO WORK laws on the ballots which require that unions still represent employees of locations where unions exist but cannot require dues.

Before the election, I had read many posts accusing Gray Davis of being a Republican. He never did any of this.

You can read more about Viet Dinh here:
http://www.mediatransparency.org/movement_goes.htm
http://www.mediatransparency.org/court_watch.htm
http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=1167
http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=3149

Transcript:
The Federalist Society

“Justice Rehnquist joined the Supreme Court before the founding of the Federalist Society, but the four colleagues that he works with in the 5-4 majority that we’ve seen now for several years – Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, O’Connor have been members of the Federalist Society, appear at their functions, and work with them -- and he works quite closely with those four Justices…This same 5-4 majority gave the Presidency to Bush in violation of the Constitution and a federal statute mandating that disputed elections get decided by Congress – the House of Representatives.

“You have to understand the agenda of the Federalist Society is to turn the United States and the federal judiciary back to before Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. That is how reactionary the Federalist Society really is. Ashcroft is a member. His deputy Viet Dinh, who drafted Patriot Act I and Patriot Act II is a prominent member. White House counsel Gonzales is a member. His entire staff are members. Most of the Bush federal judiciary appointees are members of the Federalist Society…

http://www.snowshoefilms.com/filmmakersnbcont56.html

Viet Dinh, an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy, is without question the leading figure in laying the legal fretwork for the war. Dinh graduated from Harvard Law, clerked for U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judge Laurence H. Silberman and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, and now teaches at Georgetown University. He was associate special counsel to the U.S. Senate Whitewater Committee, which fought unsuccessfully to bring down the Clintons. Born in Vietnam in 1968, Dinh was soon separated from his father, who was sent to a post-war retraining camp. His mother took the children and escaped on a crowded raft, traveling 12 days to Malaysia, where she purposefully sank the boat and made her way to freedom.

Despite having entered the U.S. as a refugee at the age of 10, Dinh has emerged as a hard-liner on the administration's 9-11 dragnet. What he says counts. Here he is in Naples, Florida, at a mid-January American Bar Association conference, setting the line on detainees. "We are reticent to provide a road map to Al Qaeda as to the progress and direction of our investigative activity," Dinh said. "We don't want to taint people as being of interest to the investigation simply because of our attention."

He added, "We will let them go if there is not enough of a predicate to hold them. But we will follow them closely, and if they so much as spit on the sidewalk, we'll arrest them. The message is that if you are a suspected terrorist you better be squeaky-clean. . . . If we can, we will keep you in jail." In the wake of September 11, some 2400 Muslim men currently sit behind bars, many on minor or no charges. The government waits for the guilty to break down and talk. For the innocent, it's their tough luck.

How did officials pick their suspects? "By the criteria Al Qaeda itself uses," he said. "Eighteen- to 35-year-old males who entered the country after the start of 2000 using passports from countries where Al Qaeda has a strong presence."

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0225/ridgeway.php

No matter what one thought of Davis he was certainly not an extremist.

[LibertyorDeath]

3. Thanks for the great info.

The Federalist Society sounds like a scary bunch of Fascists

[newyawker99]

4. Hi my_2_cents!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[Clete]

5. Wow, this is really food for thought.

I hope others read this.