Remember John Yoo – one of Bush’s torture apologists when he was deputy assistant attorney general in the US Justice Department? Well, he’s back. And now, he’s saying that only the president should be allowed to declare war because that’s the way the founders wanted it.
Speaking last week at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute where Yoo is a visiting scholar, he wowed them with these pearls of wisdom:
“There are certainly decisions that Congress participated in that might have led to bad wars,” he said. “Whether the Iraq war turns out well or badly, Congress issued a decision to authorize war. Vietnam is another war for which Congress passed a statute authorizing hostility. It doesn’t seem to me that congressional participation automatically leads to good wars.”
[…]
“How would the pro-Congress model actually work in today’s world with the kind of threats we face, how does that allows us to address terrorism?” Yoo asked the AEI audience. “What happens is there’s a real trade-off between those (pro-Congress) values and acting swiftly, quickly, and secretly.”
Not only is presidential control in war desirable, but according to Yoo’s interpretation, the Constitution supports it.
That’s about as convincing an argument as his torture justifications were and this guy is a law professor – at Berkeley. He’s still supporting torture, by the way, arguing against the McCain amendment with Alan Dershowitz’s widely debunked ticking time bomb theory:
“I think without designating constitutional power to the president, then the amendment would rule out any kind of coercive interrogation in a ticking time bomb hypothetical. And I actually have a hard time believing that people in Congress would want to completely prohibit anything more than oral questioning if we were in that kind of situation.”
And people wonder why we on the left suffer from Exploding Head Syndrome(tm) day after day over what these right-wing nutjobs spew.
They’re dangerous. Period.
This reminds me of the Arizona LEO warning to be on the lookout for people “carrying copies of the Constitution”.
Let’s see here, the Constitution couldn’t be any more clear in designating the power to declare war to the Congress. I wish someone would dig up Lincoln’s quote on the subject of President’s declaring war, it’s one of the most apt and succinct I’ve ever heard.
Of course much of the Constitution has been breached recently, including the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, just ask Jose Padilla about that.
Heck, the Congress doesn’t even control the creation of money anymore, and that’s in the main body of the Constitution.
I wish Bush and his supporters would just go ahead and nullify the Constitution in its entirety – at least that would be more honest.
Pax
Ahhh I found it. Quote by Abraham Lincoln:
And wasn’t Abe a Republican? Gasp!
Pax
Here’s a few more quotes, this time from the sainted Founding Fathers.
Alexander Hamilton:
and
and from James Madison:
But I guess John Yoo knows better than the freakin’ people who wrote the Constitution, right?
Pax
Yoo would doubtless argue that his opinion on the subject evolved into something resembling his argument.
I am getting the vibs that thsi one man an dthe likes of him, would love to get rid of congress, altoether!
What good are they, in his opinion, it seems.
Just let the president do it all. Geez, this would save us all a lot of headaches and time and effort!..:o)
Some one ought to send him back to South Korea and let him do his deeds there, and then we will see how far he gets away with his kind of thinking! I will send him no cookies while he is in prison….;o)
I really do think that drinking this kool-aid stuff, is a very dangerous thing for many ppl. They have really gone an dlost their rocker for good!
BTW, good to see ya here, soj….hugs
Section 8 is where the Congressional powers are deliniated; it clearly states that Congress has the power “To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water”.
You can find the entire Constitution here…
I am developing a s–tlist of journalists, academics, and politicians who tell lies and make basic factual errors like this here. I will be sure and put him on.
That’s why Bush tapped him for the Justice Dept.
Yoo wrote the opinion paper that Bush used to justify peemptive action in Iraq. He originally came to Bushcos attention when he wrote on Clinton’s Kosovo action..he liked that one too…no Congressional approval needed.
I’m amazed at how ideas like these keep cropping up. For most of my life I’ve believed that the Enlightenment and the “Reason and Rationality” of the 18th century had put all this nonesense to bed where it belonged, but I keep getting reminded again and again just how blind and stupid human beings can be, especially if they’re smart and deluded at the same time. In fact, there’s been progress individually since the 18th century, but on the scale of government and the workings of power–we’re barely out of the cave.
I was mildly surprised at his not being nominated to the Supreme Court. I guess the country isn’t ready yet for a Chinese Supreme.
I find it useful to remind myself that whether it’s the evangelical extremists, the Grover Norquist “loot the treasury” extremists, or the neocon warmonger crowd running the White House, that none of these groups are really advocates of democracy as the preferred form of government. They all prefer the authoritarian model with power concentrated in the hands of the leader.
For some of them, like the neocons, their enthusiasm for authoritarianism is a leftover from their time as leftist Trotskyites and Leninists, (Michael Ledeen, as an example wrote a book called “Universal Fascism” extolling that form of government, and Leo Strauss, philosophical mentor to the neocon cabal, advocates for the power of the few over the many because ofhis disdain for the ability of the common man to understand important issues.)
All of these groups are enemies of Democracy; each want’s it’s own arbitrary authority to trump the will of the people.
Crackpot Yoo is the perfect example of this totalitarian mindset.
Republican Presidents should declare war unilaterally.
Any Democratic President who dares to declare war without the express written approval of all of the Republican members of Congress is automatically impeached and goes to jail for the rest of his natural life + 300 years.
The specific text is buried somewhere in the 25th amendment, trust me.
What about even calling it the War Resolution? Isn’t that BS anyway. Isn’t the SC still the highest power on issues of international security, the same SC that wouldn’t agree on a resolution after 1441. . .
If any of you missed it a couple weeks ago — the Frontline special on TORTURE is up on PBS’s site.
You can watch it all or read transcripts or view longer interviews.
Yoo, of course, was on this show, and was — in my most scholarly assessment — completely creepy and cold and cruel.
LINK to full transcript — although I strongly recommend watching the video version.
Catnip, wish I could TIP you…. but just want to say that you did a great job.
Somehow, it’s more powerful when you write about torture because you have to look DOWN on us Americans all the time, and you have a perspective we don’t.
Entitled The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs After 9/11. There’s a review of it by David Cole in the current issue of the New York Review of Books (not available online unless you’re a subscriber to the electronic edition). Here is the opening paragraph:
The idea that any of the Founders wanted this kind of power put into the hands of the President is absurd, yet here is Yoo slithering his way up the greasy pole with just such a claim. I have read some of Cole’s review (which I’ll probably be finishing tonight), and IIRC from what little I have read, Yoo builds his case pretty much entirely around the idea that the Constitution names the President “Commander-in-Chief.” As far as I can recall, Nixon was the first president to make a big deal out of this, trying to blur the lines as to what it actually meant, i.e., Nixon implied that he was not just C-in-C of the armed forces, but something of an absolute ruler. As Nixon later said to David Frost, “If the President does it, it’s not illegal.”
The really scary thing about our current dilemma is that Republican presidents keep committing worse and worse offenses against the Constitution, but keep paying less and less of a price. Six years after Nixon was driven from office in disgrace, Reagan won a landslide victory and the GOP took the Senate for the first time in over a quarter of a century. After the Iran/Contra scandal, Reagan’s VP (who was probably up to his ears in it) was easily elected, and even though he served only one term, the GOP won both Houses of Congress only 2 years later, and now have a monopoly on power. This may be broken next year as concerns Congress, but how long before the GOP comes roaring back stronger and more wingnut than before, with Yoo and his Caesar-like view of the Presidency as their motivating ideal?
Typical republican stupidity… Just making stuff up as they go along.
Sid Note: They have a “Hotlist” feature at BooTrib now? Did I miss an announcement AND how good looking do you have to be to make it on the Hotlist? (OK… Just kidding about the second question there.)