Slayer of Ted Cruz, Defender of Justice: Sally Yates walked out of an Aaron Sorkin script on Monday

[Amaryllis]

Slayer of Ted Cruz, Defender of Justice
On Monday, Sally Yates walked out of an Aaron Sorkin script and into liberals’ hearts.
Slate

Article includes some great tweets.
Stephen Colbert:
"Wonder Woman is in theaters June 2nd. But if you want a sneak preview, watch Sally Yates' performance in front of the Senate."

Very Long snip, then this:

Even the legal world’s most prominent critic of Yates’ move against Trump’s travel ban, former Office of Legal Counsel head Jack Goldsmith, seemed to approve of her testimony. In a post for Lawfare published Monday night, Goldsmith wrote that the legal arguments Yates made at the hearing for defying Trump’s executive order were different and “more defensible” than the ones she’d laid out in her Jan. 30 directive. Back then, Goldsmith had taken Yates to task for saying only she was “[not] convinced” the order was lawful—as opposed to saying she was convinced it was unlawful—writing that he didn’t think that uncertainty was a legitimate basis for refusing to defend it. On Monday, he noted, Yates was more forceful in her analysis, telling the senators in no uncertain terms she believed the order was unconstitutional. Goldsmith speculated in ways unflattering to Yates as to why she didn’t strike that note originally—“perhaps … she did not express herself well because she wrote the letter under time pressure,” he wrote—but ultimately seemed more convinced than before that her legal reasoning had been sound.
Advertisement

If Goldsmith was impressed with Yates’ lack of equivocation, the newest members of her fan club were likely reacting to something else: her precision. For nearly three hours, she maintained impeccable control over every word that came out of her mouth. When she started a sentence, you knew she had an ending already planned. When she was asked a question, you could tell she was actually listening and would respond to all of its particularities rather than reciting some stock answer she had brought to the hearing in her back pocket.

Yates was specific, too. At one point, she realized she’d made a mistake earlier in her testimony when she’d stated that she and White House Counsel Don McGahn had “two in-person meetings and one phone call” about retired Lt. Gen Michael Flynn in the days before her dismissal from the Justice Department. After being asked to go back over that timeline, Yates caught her error and corrected herself. There had actually been two phone calls, not one: She’d forgotten that in addition to the substantive phone conversation between herself and McGahn on Jan. 30, McGahn had also called her on Jan. 27 to set up their second meeting.

“Sorry about that,” Yates said, signaling just how seriously she takes detail and accuracy even when making a minor procedural point.

This was the opposite of the posture Americans have gotten used to since the dawn of the new administration. Unlike Yates, President Trump and his circle prefer vagueness because it allows them to evade the truth more easily and to avoid getting caught not knowing things. There is a slackness to much of what Trump says—a simultaneously strained and effortless quality to the haze of incomplete thoughts, generalizations, and meaningless phrases that dribble out of him wherever he goes. When Trump does try to get specific, he tends to get things wrong. On the same day Yates sat before the Senate subcommittee and performed the legal equivalent of surgery, the president misspelled “White House Counsel” on Twitter.

Yates was already an avatar for the anti-Trump resistance before her performance Monday. Now it’s official: She is the Democratic Party’s new star. In the months ahead, she should expect to hear a lot of talk about what office she’ll run for and when. Liberals now know who Sally Yates is, and they really, really like what they see.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/05/sally_yates_walked_out_of_an_aaron_sorkin_script_and_into_liberals_hearts.html?wpsrc=newsletter_tis&sid=589dfd6ebcb59c58118b45d5

[2naSalit]

1. I sure do!