There were plenty of people unhappy with Chuck Schumer this week, and I suppose on one level I'm one of them, but I have to admit that I find this persuasive:

Should we reject Judge Mukasey, President Bush has said he would install an acting, caretaker attorney general who could serve for the rest of his term without the advice and consent of the Senate. To accept such an unaccountable attorney general, I believe, would be to surrender the department to the extreme ideology of Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, David Addington. All the work we did to pressure Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign would be undone in a moment.

Mukasey's waffling on water-boarding is worrisome (and alliterative!), but I have little doubt that an unconfirmed temporary AG would be several orders of magnitude worse. The Bush administration's commitment to justice (not to mention Justice) is, to put it mildly, laughable. And as much as I hate to say it, the devil we kinda know might be significantly better than the devil we don't. So hesitantly, and with very little confidence, I'm going out on a limb: I'm with Schumer.

Chessmasters, they are:

Mr. Leahy and other Senate Democrats had suggested that they would press for a variety of documents involving the firing of the United States attorneys and the eavesdropping program before agreeing to schedule confirmation hearings for a successor to Alberto R. Gonzales, who resigned as attorney general last month.

The decision to go forward with the hearings appeared to reflect a calculation by Mr. Leahy and other Democrats that they did not want to be seen as willing to leave the post unfilled after complaining so loudly of turmoil in the department under Mr. Gonzales.