Impugning lawyers? What's next?

John Schwartz has an article in The New York Times about Liz Cheney and her wacko friends, who wonder why lawyers take on bad clients:

A conservative advocacy organization in Washington, Keep America Safe, kicked up a storm last week when it released a video that questioned the loyalty of Justice Department lawyers who had worked in the past on behalf of detained terrorism suspects. But beyond the expected liberal outrage, the tactics of the group, which is run by Liz Cheney, the daughter of the former vice president, have also split the tightly knit world of conservative legal scholars. Many conservatives, including members of the Federalist Society, the quarter-century-old policy group devoted to conservative and libertarian legal ideals, have vehemently criticized Ms. Cheney’s video, and say it violates the American legal principle that even unpopular defendants deserve a lawyer.
“There’s something truly bizarre about this,” said Richard A. Epstein, a University of Chicago law professor and a revered figure among many members of the society. “Liz Cheney is a former student of mine, I don’t know what moves her on this thing,” he said.
Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, issued a joint letter criticizing the “shameful series of attacks” on government lawyers, which it said were “unjust to the individuals in question and destructive of any attempt to build lasting mechanisms for counterterrorism adjudications". The letter was signed by a long list of former Republican administration officials and conservative legal figures, including Kenneth W. Starr, the former special prosecutor, and Charles D. Stimson, who resigned from the second Bush administration after suggesting that businesses might think twice before hiring law firms that had represented detainees. Other Bush administration figures who signed include Peter D. Keisler, a former acting attorney general, and Larry D. Thompson, a former deputy attorney general. The letter cited “the American tradition of zealous representation of unpopular clients”, including the defense by John Adams of British soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre, and noted that some detainee advocates, who worked pro bono, have made arguments that swayed the Supreme Court.
Ms. Cheney’s video referred to the lawyers as the “al-Qaeda Seven,” and accused the Justice Department of concealing their names, which were later revealed by Fox News.
David B. Rivkin Jr., the co-chairman of the Center for Law and Counterterrorism in Washington, is a member of the Federalist Society and signed the Brookings letter; he said the attack was unfortunate. “I appreciate the partisan advantage to be gained here,” Mr. Rivkin said, but “it’s not the right way to proceed”. He said he preferred “principled ways for debating where this administration is wrong; there’s no reason to resort to ad hominem attacks.”
John C. Yoo, the former Justice official whose memorandums on torture and presidential power were used to justify some of the most controversial policies of the Bush administration, said he had not seen the material from Ms. Cheney’s group. But Professor Yoo, who now teaches at the University of California at Berkeley, and is active in the Federalist Society, said the debate about lawyers who once represented detainees at the American prison in Guantánamo Bay serving in the Justice Department was overheated. “What’s the big whoop?” he asked. “The Constitution makes the president the chief law enforcement officer. We had an election. President Obama has softer policies on terror than his predecessor.” He said, “He can and should put people into office who share his views.” Once the American people know who the policy makers are, he said, “they can decide whether they agree with him or not.”
Professor Epstein, however, said he found it “appalling” to see people equating work on detainee cases with a dearth of patriotism. He was a co-author of a brief in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court case argued by Neal Katyal, now the principal deputy solicitor general and a lawyer under scrutiny from Ms. Cheney’s group. The court ruled that the Bush administration’s initial plans for military commissions to try detainees violated the law. “You don’t want to give the impression that because you oppose the government on this thing, that means you’re just one of those lefties, which I am not,” he said.
For David M. McIntosh, a former member of Congress and a founder of the Federalist Society, the split among conservatives is not necessarily ideological, but may have to do with experience in the day-to-day world of legal practice. Those in the profession, Mr. McIntosh said, are more likely to argue that a lawyer should not be judged by his clients, though he said it was legitimate to examine the agenda of the lawyers.
“Was the person acting merely as an attorney doing their best to represent a client’s case,” he asked, “or did they seek out the opportunity to represent them or write an amicus brief because they have a political or personal agenda that made them more interested in participating in those cases?” If the commitment to the cases is ideological, he said, it is reasonable to ask, “Is that the best attorney for the Justice Department?”
Matthew Miller, a Justice Department spokesman, said accusations that the administration had been secretive or had dragged its feet in responding to the inquiry were untrue. But Mr. Miller said the department would not participate “in an attempt to drag people’s names through the mud for political purposes.”
In a letter sent to Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, the Justice Department said in February that the lawyers understood that they had to take different positions while working for the United States than they did as private lawyers, and that in any case they would recuse themselves from matters in which they had participated earlier.
A Keep America Safe spokesman responded to a request for comment by passing along links to essays by supporters like Marc A. Thiessen, a columnist for The Washington Post, who wrote that the detainees did not deserve the same level of representation as criminal defendants. The lawyers, Mr. Thiessen wrote, “were not doing their constitutional duty to defend unpopular criminal defendants.” He said, “They were using the federal courts as a tool to undermine our military’s ability to keep dangerous enemy combatants off the battlefield in a time of war.”
David Remes, a lawyer who represents 18 detainees, said in a telephone interview from Guantánamo that the deeper point of the attack on the lawyers was political. The goal, Mr. Remes suggested, “was to make the Obama administration and the Justice Department even more gun-shy than they are on Guantánamo issues.”

Rico says having legal representation for bad people is kinda the American way, sorry; if we didn't, you might as well just take the bastards out in the parking lot and shoot them. (Not such a bad idea, in some cases, but it does violate several provisions of that stupid document, the Constitution...)
But ad hominem? Rico says he had to look it up here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homonym would've been funnier...