President Bush likes to talk about not being swayed by public opinion, especially the views of Democrats. At a news conference last December, he said the most important criterion for picking a president is “whether or not somebody’s got a sound set of principles from which they will not deviate as they make decisions.”

Unhappily for the country, we have learned that Mr. Bush has no idea when standing on principle becomes blind stubbornness and then destructive obsession. So it goes with his choice to run the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Steven Bradbury.

In a lower job in that office, Mr. Bradbury signed off on two secret legal memos authorizing torture in American detention camps. The first approved waterboarding, among other things. When Congress outlawed waterboarding, the other memo assured Mr. Bush that he could ignore the law.

Mr. Bradbury is widely viewed on both sides of the aisle as such a toxic choice that he will never be confirmed. The Senate has already refused to do so twice. Still, Mr. Bush clings to this lost cause, snarling the confirmation process for hundreds of nominees and crippling parts of the federal regulatory apparatus.