{"id":13516,"date":"2011-06-19T04:14:10","date_gmt":"2011-06-19T11:14:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=13516"},"modified":"2011-06-19T04:14:10","modified_gmt":"2011-06-19T11:14:10","slug":"obama-breaks-law-with-impunity-and-cherry-picked-legal-opinions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=13516","title":{"rendered":"Obama Breaks Law With Impunity And Cherry-Picked Legal Opinions"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New York Times<\/em> reports<\/a> on the process by which President Obama came to the Orwellian legal conclusion that our actions in Libya are not “hostilities,” and thus do not need Congress’ approval under the War Powers Resolution. As the Times <\/em>dryly says, “A sticking point for some skeptics was whether any mission that included firing missiles from drone aircraft could be portrayed as not amounting to hostilities.”<\/p>\n

The administration followed an unusual process in developing its position. Traditionally, the Office of Legal Counsel solicits views from different agencies and then decides what the best interpretation of the law is. The attorney general or the president can overrule its views, but rarely do.<\/p>\n

In this case, however, Ms. Krass was asked to submit the Office of Legal Counsel\u2019s thoughts in a less formal way to the White House, along with the views of lawyers at other agencies. After several meetings and phone calls, the rival legal analyses were submitted to Mr. Obama, who is a constitutional lawyer, and he made the decision. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It seems very likely that Obama knew what outcome he wanted, and rather than seek the most authoritative opinion, he picked the one that came to the conclusions he desired. As Jack Balkin<\/a> points out, this is substantially similar to how Bush operated.<\/p>\n

By bypassing a careful set of procedures designed to produce careful legal opinions, George W. Bush was able to say that he was following the OLC, or at least a rump of the OLC. But he was effectively undermining the OLC’s function as an honest broker of executive branch opinions. Obama also bypassed this same careful set of procedures by canvassing various lawyers until he found opinions he liked better than the OLC’s. If one is disturbed by Bush’s misuse of the process for vetting legal questions, one should be equally disturbed by Obama’s irregular procedures.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Andrew Sullivan<\/a> writes:<\/p>\n

There’s no inherent Constitutional bar on the president making the final decision on legal matters. But the tradition of an independent legal entity at the Justice Department to provide objective analysis is designed to prevent the president cherry-picking legal decisions as he sees fit. From Bush to Obama, we have now seen conclusively that the presidency is out of control when it comes to war and peace. Given the obvious irregularities that brought the president to such a betrayal of a core campaign message, and his previous statements on presidential war-making power, we need this Congress to fight back.<\/p>\n

The Congress needs to vote to end this war, illegally begun, illegally continued, and defended with a presidential hauteur more fitting a monarch than a president. If we cannot restrain or shame even Obama in the face of this individual act of war, how on earth will we ever prevent future presidents from doing more? If we do not stop this legally unaccountable war-making machine now, when will we?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’d really like to vote for a President who respects the Constitution and isn’t overly willing to go to war. Unfortunately, that means giving my vote to a third party candidate, because it’s obvious that neither major party would ever nominate such a candidate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Times reports on the process by which President Obama came to the Orwellian legal conclusion that our actions in Libya are not “hostilities,” and thus do not need Congress’ approval under the War Powers Resolution. As the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[135,39,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crossposted-on-tada","category-in-the-news","category-international-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13516"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13516\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13517,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13516\/revisions\/13517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}