When the subject returned to waterboarding, there was especially tough questioning by Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who had initially championed Mr. Mukasey’s nomination and has sometimes defended his performance when other Democrats have not.  

The senator appeared exasperated by Mr. Mukasey’s refusal to say whether waterboarding was torture and should be outlawed, despite the attorney general’s statement during his confirmation hearings that he found the technique “repugnant.” 

“I find it hard to understand how you personally, when asked for advice, would not be able to say that something that’s repugnant should be outlawed,” Mr. Schumer said. “You said it’s repugnant. I don’t understand how you can now say, Well, I have to ask a whole lot of other people.”

I AM voting today to support Michael B. Mukasey for attorney general for one critical reason: the Department of Justice — once the crown jewel among our government institutions — is a shambles and is in desperate need of a strong leader, committed to depoliticizing the agency’s operations. . . .  

There is virtually universal agreement, even from those who oppose Judge Mukasey, that he would do a good job in turning the department around. My colleagues who oppose his confirmation have gone out of their way to praise his character and qualifications. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, for one, commended Judge Mukasey as “a brilliant lawyer, a distinguished jurist and by all accounts a good man.” 

Most important, Judge Mukasey has demonstrated his fidelity to the rule of law, saying that if he believed the president were violating the law he would resign. 

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. 

I deeply oppose this administration’s opaque policy on the use of torture — its refusal to reveal what forms of interrogation it considers acceptable. In particular, I believe that the cruel and inhumane technique of waterboarding is not only repugnant but also illegal under current laws and conventions. I also support Congress’s efforts to pass additional measures that would explicitly ban this and other forms of torture. I voted for Senator Ted Kennedy’s anti-torture amendment in 2006 and am a co-sponsor of his similar bill in this Congress. 

Judge Mukasey’s refusal to state that waterboarding is illegal was unsatisfactory to me and many other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. But Congress is now considering — and I hope we will soon pass — a law that would explicitly ban the use of waterboarding and other abusive interrogation techniques. And I am confident that Judge Mukasey would enforce that law.