Cass Sunstein Is No Van Jones

TW: When a Van Jones situation happens it is almost all bad for the POTUS. POTUS and his staff look incompetent as someone with Jones' baggage should have never made it past their own filters. Some members of the POTUS base will be pissed that the POTUS did not fall on his sword in support of their own. And worst of all idiotic fools like Glenn Beck can proudly tag a scalp to their wall.

There is only one upside for a POTUS which is that folks like Beck and Fox Nation will almost always attempt to cross the bridge too far. With the scent of blood in the water they will keep foaming in search of new meat until they bash their heads into a wall. They are now gunning for Cass Sunstein. Cass Sunstein is a VERY good scholar without Van Jones baggage. Obama will fall on his sword for Sunstein (or else legitimately face the music of letting one's enemies run his administration which would be foolish and incompetent).

From Economist:
"HAVING vanquished Van Jones..., Republicans are now gunning for Cass Sunstein, Obama's nominee for regulatory czar. I thought Jones deserved the boot. He is a radical who flirts with utter nutters. Sunstein, by contrast, is one of Obama's better appointments.

As I've argued before, the White House needs someone who will take a cold hard look at which regulations are cost-effective and which are not. Sunstein is just the man for the job.

But Republican senators have put a hold on his nomination, and the blowhards of cable and talk radio are denouncing him from the rooftops.

Sunstein's problem is that he has written a lot of thoughtful books which ponder difficult questions and explore a variety of possible solutions. This makes him easy to quote out of context. For example, an article in CNS news says:

Cass Sunstein, President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), has advocated a policy under which the government would “presume” someone has consented to having his or her organs removed for transplantation into someone else when they die unless that person has explicitly indicated that his or her organs should not be taken. Under such a policy, hospitals would harvest organs from people who never gave permission for this to be done.

This is rubbish. He laid out this argument in order to dismiss it. If you read to the end of the article, you see that what he actually proposed was a system in which you would have to make a choice. When applying for a driver's license, you would have to tick "yes" or "no" to the question: would you like to donate your organs if you die? Sounds like a good idea to me. And, as Instapundit points out, it's nothing like the Monty Python scenario.

Another angle of attack concerns guns. The website StopSunstein.com quotes him as saying that:
"[A]lmost all gun control legislation is constitutionally fine."

What he actually said was that:
"If [something the Supreme Court said in 1939] is taken seriously, almost all gun control legislation is constitutionally fine."

He then adds:
"I am not insisting that there is no individual right to bear arms."
I don't agree with all of Sunstein's views, particularly the ones concerning animal rights. But he deserves better than this."