Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/shields-brooks-consider-mukasey-vote-kerik-indictment Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Michael Mukasey was sworn in as Attorney General on Friday after a divided Senate confirmation vote and former New York police commissioner Bernard Kerik pleaded not guilty to charges of corruption. Analysts Mark Shields and David Brooks discuss the week's news. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. JUDY WOODRUFF: And to the analysis of Shields and Brooks, syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.Gentlemen, good to see you this Friday. DAVID BROOKS, Columnist, New York Times: Good to see you. JUDY WOODRUFF: Mark, Michael Mukasey confirmed today, but only six-vote margin among Democrats. Does that tell us something about how he's going to do during — or how he's going to be confronted during his tenure? MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist: Well, I think the honeymoon will be short. I mean, this is somebody who really came with great bipartisan backing, and the hearings themselves really precipitated and provoked the opposition to him.I think Republicans are enormously relieved to have an attorney general they're not embarrassed to defend. There's a hope that his leadership and just his presence will restore the department, where morale is very low and which for a long time has been quite leaderless. Before Gonzales left, he was under investigation himself and has been on autopilot or worse ever since.But I think one good thing will come out of the hearings, and I think the Congress now faces the responsibility on dealing with waterboarding and bringing civilians under the same code of ethics and law that the military has observed and lives by. JUDY WOODRUFF: Is that, in essence, the legacy of these hearings? DAVID BROOKS: I think so. And Mukasey has said he will enforce — if Congress passes a law on waterboarding, he will enforce it. And I think that will put the central controversy over his nomination to rest, and he'll go on and run the department.And aside from this issue, there was basically very few complaints. Most people think he's a very serious guy, very good guy, and I think he's probably likely to be part of this new team that the Bush administration has put together with Gates and Paulson and a bunch of people who are far superior than anybody had before. So I think he'll have a quite successful tenure.