The Monica Goodling Show

I haven't had the time to watch or read any of Monica Goodling's testimony yesterday, but others have. Dahlia Lithwick thinks the members of the House judiciary committee were caught flat-footed by Goodling and failed to ask the right questions or follow up on interesting bits of testimony. Marty Lederman notices some interesting caveats and qualifiers in Goodling's written statement. And Hilzoy's take is always worth reading:

I've been listening to Monica Goodling's testimony while I do other things, and it has done very little so far to clarify any of the underlying questions the US Attorney scandal has raised. She has admitted asking political questions, like how people voted, during job interviews for career appointees, and while she scrupulously avoided claiming that Paul McNulty perjured himself before Congress, she did say that she believed not just that his testimony was inaccurate, but that he was aware of the truth when he gave it. But she has not said anything to clear up the central question: who put the US Attorneys on the firing list, and why? What she has said just confirms the sense that there was nothing that remotely resembled a good decision-making process. . . .

Since Goodling, like everyone else so far, denies any knowledge of how various names came to be on the list, it still seems to have emerged by a process of spontaneous generation unsullied by any actual human agency, the way people once believed that mice were spontaneously generated from rags and dust.

Sounds about right. I'll probably have more to say on this subject once I've had a chance to read the testimony myself.