NYT: Obama overruled top Pentagon, DOJ lawyers on Libya war powers

I’d urge you to read more about the opinions John Yoo wrote during the Bush years. I’m sure you’ll be at the very least, equally outraged

crr6 on June 18, 2011 at 2:38 AM

How’s that frivolous lawsuit against Yoo proceeding? Last time I checked, the O’bama Administration was trying to get it dismissed.

Del Dolemonte on June 18, 2011 at 9:37 AM

LOL

Rick Moran at American Thinker

Obama went lawyer shopping for War Powers Act opinion

So what if the top legal advisors at the Pentagon and Department of Justice told the president he had to get congressional authorization for the war in Libya? Obama was sure he could find someone to split the necessary legal hairs to find him justification to make war without pesky democratic checks and balances like, you know, the law standing in his way.

To say that the legal justification Obama accepted from other attorneys is weak, a stretch, contradictory, and without merit is just getting started in a critique of the president’s actions. He actually overrode the top legal minds in government when it comes to warmaking in order to give congress the back of his hand.

For the record, Bush did something similar in overriding legal opinions at DoJ on FISA warrants. The legal justification for enhanced interrogation techniques was also shopped by the White House.

But in the Bush case, these actions were taken post 9/11 and dealt with the security of the US. No one argues that Libya is anything but a “humanitarian” adventure with zero impact on the safety and security of the country.

And only rank partisans argue that our actions in Libya fail to rise to the level of involvement where the War Powers Act should not be triggered.

The moral of this story is, if presidents look hard enough, they can probably find a legal justification for just about anything.

Del Dolemonte on June 18, 2011 at 12:07 PM

Glenn Greenwald’s site is getting some hysterical “letters to the editor”…

Of course, Glenn, Obama is a lawyer who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. He is perfectly capable of determining which legal opinions he received from different lawyers in his own administration are persuasive and which are not. This is not a situation where he had to trust in and defer to the experts. He is himself an expert.

(One of crr6′s relatives in CA)

When I can’t tell the right wing authoritarians and chickenhawks from those of the CultOfObama I figure the gap between the Bush administration and the Obama administration has narrowed to an indistinguishable degree. Not a nearly indistinguishable degree; but the distinction is without any substantive difference. The Limit is not just approaching Zero [L-->O], in defiance of Leibniz (apologies to Newton), Zero has been reached and breached.

He’s worse than Cheney, isn’t he?

And WHO helped him get elected?

(Try not to make the same mistake again…)

By the way, economically, his wars are, in many ways, breaking this country economically.

Shouldn’t he be held accountable?

Del Dolemonte on June 18, 2011 at 12:20 PM

I mentioned Jack Goldsmith earlier; he worked for the Bush Regime after John Yoo left. Here’s what he has to say about this latest mess:

The Administration argues that its operation is legitimated and limited by the U.N. Security Council Resolution. It does not really explain why it thinks this. But in any event, the “no danger to troops” theory, combined with the heavy reliance on the Security Council Resolution, suggest that the Administration is creating a principle of unilateral presidential war power for U.N.-sponsored interventions from a distance. In practice, this principle will likely favor humanitarian over national security interventions, since the U.N. is more likely to authorize a purely humanitarian intervention than one that has a more obvious U.S. national security interest. So the ambition of the Obama legal theory – or at least its effect – is to carve out a place for presidential war unilateralism for U.N.-sponsored humanitarian wars but not (for lack of a better phrase) national security wars. That ambition (or effect), unsurprisingly, dovetails with the commitments and preferences of some top Obama advisors.

Del Dolemonte on June 18, 2011 at 1:21 PM

More from Jack Goldsmith

It is interesting and unusual enough that President Obama, of all people, would take an aggressive view of his war authorities and interpret the WPR very narrowly. But the lawyers he relied on to reach this conclusion make the situation even more interesting and unusual. I discount the legal input of the White House Counsel; Bob Bauer is a smart man but neither he nor his office is expert in war powers or situated to offer thorough legal advice on the issue. Legal Advisor Harold Koh, by contrast, spent his entire academic career studying and writing about presidential war powers, including the WPR. Based on this academic record, one would not have expected Koh to push an unusually narrow interpretation of the WPR. Nor would one have expected him to have supported the original constitutional justification for unilateral presidential intervention in Libya. To get a flavor of what one might have expected, consider what Koh’s former colleague Bruce Ackerman said in support of his nomination to lead State-L:

“This is the real importance of the Koh nomination. President Obama has selected one of the few lawyers who probed deeply into the constitutional implications of presidential unilateralism and how it might be controlled. Koh would be taking his position as legal adviser at one of the rare moments when it might be politically possible to consider a National Security Charter that aims to restore an effective system of checks and balances.”

This is not how things have worked out. One wonders why. One possibility is that Koh has a client, the Secretary of State, who is committed to the Libya intervention, and he is serving his client faithfully. Another possibility is that Koh’s commitments to humanitarian intervention and the “responsibility to protect” outweigh his commitment to his academic vision of presidential war powers. I certainly do not believe that Koh’s academic views should control his advice and judgment during his government service. Nor do I think that his academic writings addressed the precise issue under the WPR that he is now advocating in the government. But for a quarter century before heading up State-L, Koh was the leading and most vocal academic critic of presidential unilateralism in war, and a tireless advocate for institutional cooperation between the political branches in war decisions. I am thus genuinely surprised, as many people are, by his current stance.

Del Dolemonte on June 18, 2011 at 2:17 PM