While Rep. Lloyd Doggett, the leader of Texas’s House Democratic delegation, has already forwarded his three U.S. Attorney recommendations for the Western District of Texas to President Obama, the state’s Republican senators continue to press on.

John Cornyn

The screening committee formed by Republican Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn will be interviewing six candidates today for the Western District position, reports the Austin American-Statesman.  We reported last month on the senators’ efforts to stay involved in the selection process by forming their own bi-partisan advisory commitee.  You can also read our interview with Doggett regarding the screening committee here.

The six candidates will be interviewed by the 31-member screening committee in the San Antonio offices of the Bracewell & Giuliani law firm.  The committee has already conducted interviews in Texas’s other three districts, the American-Statesman reports.  While none of the names have been released publicly, the paper has confirmed the six candidates through people involved in the search process.

The candidates to be interviewed are:

• David Escamilla, head of the Travis County attorney’s office
• San Antonio City Attorney Michael Bernard
• Michael McCrum, former chief of the major crimes unit in the San Antonio division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District
• U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert Pitman, a former Deputy Chief U.S. Attorney under former U.S. Attorney for the Western District Johnny Sutton, and acting U.S. attorney during a vacancy in 2001
• John Murphy, who took over as Acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District when Sutton stepped down, and previously First Assistant U.S. Attorney for 15 years
• James William Blagg, former U.S. Attorney for the Western District in the Clinton administration.

The paper has learned through its sources that Escamilla, Bernard, and McCrum were the three candidates recommended by Doggett to Obama, with Escamilla leading the pack.  Pitman, Murphy, and Blagg all submitted applications to Hutchison and Cornyn.

The committee will rank the candidates from 1 to 6.  Then the senators will decide which candidates to interview, according to the committee’s chairman Daniel Hedges.

To learn more about the search committee, read our previous report here.  You can also find our interview with Doggett here.

After taking a beating last week for flip-flopping around on the issue of potential prosecutions for Bush officials who authorized torture, Obama Administration officials fanned out on Sunday talk shows to insist they’ve always been perfectly clear: The “rule of law” means the decision is up to the Justice Department.

On “Meet the Press,” David Gregory asked White House press secretary Robert Gibbs: “Why the shifting positions?”

“Well, David, I don’t think the president has shifted his position,” Gibbs said. “I think what the president said on the Thursday in which the memos were released, all the way through this, he’s been consistent and clear: those that followed the legal advice, the four corners of the legal advice in good faith, those people should not and will not be prosecuted.  But the president, as you know, David, doesn’t determine who knowingly breaks the law or not.  That’s set up and devised by the Justice Department and other lawyers and legal entities to decide those questions.”

GREGORY:  Does the president believe or suspect that Bush administration lawyers conspired to violate the anti-torture law?
GIBBS:  Well, I, I think that’s a determination that the lawyers are going to make, and they’re going to have to take a look at them.

More Gibbs: “This president campaigned very vehemently on the notion that the rule of law and that legal decisions should be made not by political figures, but by justice figures.”

On CNN’s “State of the Union,” White House adviser Valerie Jarrett repeated the talking point. “What he [the president] has said is that anyone who followed the advice of the Justice Department and did any kind of acts that were within the confines of that advice, he doesn’t think we should prosecute. … The rest of it, he leaves up to the U.S. attorney general. That is who is supposed to make decisions about prosecution.”

Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Austin has emerged as Texas’s point man on nominations for the state’s four U.S. Attorney slots after a tug-of-war between the White House, the state’s two Republican senators and Texas House Democrats for control of the process.

The losers: Texas GOP Sens. John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison.

News of the bizarre tussle surfaced on March 19, when the Dallas Morning News reported that the White House apparently had acceded to the Texas senator’s demands to continue, as they had under the Bush administration, forwarding recommendations for judicial and other nominees, even though Democrats now controlled the White House.

Cornyn told the paper he and Hutchison had reached an “understanding” with Obama White House counsel Greg Craig. The senators would continue to screen candidates, he said, though now with the “input” of Texas Democratic House members. Cornyn and Hutchison promptly issued a public invitation for lawyers to apply through them for the U.S. Attorney jobs in Houston and Dallas.

This got the Texas House Democrats’ dander up. Led by delegation chairman Doggett, they demanded a meeting with Craig and gave him an “earful,” the Morning News reported March 25. The White House then released a statement contradicting Cornyn’s earlier claim. “No federal judge, U.S. Attorney or U.S. Marshal will be nominated by the president… unless that person has the confirmed support of the Texas Democratic delegation,” the statement read.

But Cornyn, an aggressive conservative and Senate Judiciary Committee member, said the next day that he wasn’t stepping aside. “The day that we elect a Democrat to the United States Senate in Texas, they are entitled to function as they would with a Democratic president,” he told the Morning News. “I’m not going to delegate my responsibility to anybody else.” He told the Fort Worth Star Telegram that Craig had been a “little embarrassed” by the statement and that the White House would issue a “clarification” in support of the senator’s roles. But no clarification was forthcoming. In an email to Main Justice, White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said the White House stood by its earlier statement.

By tradition, senators of the same party as the White House make recommendations for U.S. Attorney, judge and federal marshal nominations. The tradition evolved as the Senate’s response to its Article II “advice and consent” role. When a state doesn’t have senators of the same party as the administration, the plum often falls to House members of the same party. Sometimes, as in the case of former Virginia Sens. Chuck Robb (D) and John Warner (R), the senators reach bipartisan agreement on names. This Congressional Research Service report describes how the tradition evolved.

The Texas spat was imbued with partisan rancor. The Texas senators during the Bush administration had used a secretive selection committee that Cornyn conceded to the Morning News had been “heavily stacked with Republican lawyers” in the past. But he said the senators were now working to bring some “prominent Democratic lawyers” into the process, and that their committee would send nominations to the White House anyway.

FUN FACT: In this recent Saturday Night Live parody, “Obama” gets mad and throws “Kay Bailey Hutchison” out the window of the Oval Office. Watch it below: