The POTUS can order you to crush the testicles of children, and none may gainsay him.
A while back, in the wake of certain attempts to clarify whether or not the chief counselors of Sodden Prince Georgie were actually saying as they seemed to be, that Dux Super Legis, and questioning them directly on what limits on the War-Duke's power they would admit, a meme went about, grotesque in the extreme but not I thought uncalled for - but I figured it for an extrapolation, an If/Then drawing-out of the consequences of the position taken, not a word-for-word rendering of the debate.
Being much distracted then (well, always, but moreso then), I failed to notice this media extract and citation of Dr. Yoo's word-for-word statements on the subject of the President's right to order a child's testicles crushed, in specific.
No law, domestic or foreign, can bind the Dux Bellorum, quoth the learned doctor, who is now professor of the law, at Berkeley.
--It may be salutary to note, given that Alito has openly declared his admiration [video] for Judge Bork (of whom I have spoken mockingly in the past both for his duplicity and his pomposity, and whose daughter Ellen I have mentioned once or twice as a Hegemony crony and PNAC stalwart thinktank "expert" in foreign affairs) that Judge Bork in that Orwellian festival of Scaife-Coors-Bradley sponsored opposition (but hardly loyal oppo, that) in 1996 (where Chuck Colson of Watergate, who was Nixon's man, also guest-starred) proclaimed (among many other things, including his loathing for homosexuality and feminism and all the SCOTUS save Scalia and Thomas) the hope that future public servants would refuse to obey the Supreme Court's decrees:
.Viewing the carnage created by the Court, George Will referred to the Justices as "our robed masters." When the VMI decision came down, my wife said the Justices were behaving like a "band of outlaws." Neither of those appellations is in the least bit extreme. The Justices are our masters in a way that no President, Congressman, governor, or other elected official is. They order our lives and we have no recourse, no means of resisting, no means of altering their ukases. They are indeed robed masters. But "band of outlaws"? An outlaw is a person who coerces others without warrant in law. That is precisely what a majority of the present Supreme Court does. That is, given the opportunity, what the Supreme Court has always done.
The astonishing thing is that anybody is surprised at this. Without realizing quite what they were doing, generations of Americans have accorded all courts, and most especially the Supreme Court, unchecked power. We ought to have known what would inevitably happen. Lord Acton's famous aphorism about power corrupting turns out to be right: Given unchecked power, most human beings, even those in robes, will abuse that power.
Only a change in our institutional arrangements can halt the transformation of our society and culture by judges. Decisions of courts might be made subject to modification or reversal by majority vote of the Senate and the House of Representatives. Alternatively, courts might be deprived of the power of constitutional review. Either of those solutions would require a constitutional amendment. Perhaps an elected official will one day simply refuse to comply with a Supreme Court decision.
That suggestion will be regarded as shocking, but it should not be. To the objection that a rejection of a court's authority would be civil disobedience, the answer is that a court that issues orders without authority engages in an equally dangerous form of civil disobedience.
I don't think he'll any more subscribe to that, however, nor his admirers, once they hold the throne. Somehow, I just have that doubtful feeling these days.
[partial transcript of 1988 video]
Interviewer:
You were appointed by Ed Meese. Were you part of what liberals would call the Meese/Bork/Charles Freed/William Bradford Reynolds crowd in the Justice Department?
Alito:
Well, I think that's kind of a pejorative way of putting it. I - I agree with many of the things they attempted to do, but I'd prefer to discuss it issue by issue than on the basis of labels.
Interviewer:
Well, did you think Robert Bork should have been confirmed for the Supreme Court?
Alito:
I certainly thought he should have been. I think he was one of the most outstanding nominees of the century.
Interviewer:
Why? --How?
Alito:
He was a man of unequalled - he *is* a man of unequaled intellectual ability, understanding of constitutional history, someone who had thought deeply thorugh his entire life about constitutional issues and about the supreme Court and the role that it ought to play in American society. And I think that if the public had accurately understood what the positions that he, ah, the positions that he holds and made those wishes known to their elected representatives, that he would have been overwhelmingly confirmed, but I think through a sort of a fluke about the way the nomination came up, and the kind of campaign that was mounted against him, he was unjustifiably rejected.
[There's plenty more weaseling and unctuousness in that little interview - Uriah Heep is alive and well and oiling his way through the courts of the land. Charles Fried is another "old conservative" openly defending the current Bushco surveillance policy, btw, while teaching law at Harvard. Meese was the sketchy Attorney General under ethically-challenged president Reagan and VP Bush I.]
Being much distracted then (well, always, but moreso then), I failed to notice this media extract and citation of Dr. Yoo's word-for-word statements on the subject of the President's right to order a child's testicles crushed, in specific.
No law, domestic or foreign, can bind the Dux Bellorum, quoth the learned doctor, who is now professor of the law, at Berkeley.
--It may be salutary to note, given that Alito has openly declared his admiration [video] for Judge Bork (of whom I have spoken mockingly in the past both for his duplicity and his pomposity, and whose daughter Ellen I have mentioned once or twice as a Hegemony crony and PNAC stalwart thinktank "expert" in foreign affairs) that Judge Bork in that Orwellian festival of Scaife-Coors-Bradley sponsored opposition (but hardly loyal oppo, that) in 1996 (where Chuck Colson of Watergate, who was Nixon's man, also guest-starred) proclaimed (among many other things, including his loathing for homosexuality and feminism and all the SCOTUS save Scalia and Thomas) the hope that future public servants would refuse to obey the Supreme Court's decrees:
.Viewing the carnage created by the Court, George Will referred to the Justices as "our robed masters." When the VMI decision came down, my wife said the Justices were behaving like a "band of outlaws." Neither of those appellations is in the least bit extreme. The Justices are our masters in a way that no President, Congressman, governor, or other elected official is. They order our lives and we have no recourse, no means of resisting, no means of altering their ukases. They are indeed robed masters. But "band of outlaws"? An outlaw is a person who coerces others without warrant in law. That is precisely what a majority of the present Supreme Court does. That is, given the opportunity, what the Supreme Court has always done.
The astonishing thing is that anybody is surprised at this. Without realizing quite what they were doing, generations of Americans have accorded all courts, and most especially the Supreme Court, unchecked power. We ought to have known what would inevitably happen. Lord Acton's famous aphorism about power corrupting turns out to be right: Given unchecked power, most human beings, even those in robes, will abuse that power.
Only a change in our institutional arrangements can halt the transformation of our society and culture by judges. Decisions of courts might be made subject to modification or reversal by majority vote of the Senate and the House of Representatives. Alternatively, courts might be deprived of the power of constitutional review. Either of those solutions would require a constitutional amendment. Perhaps an elected official will one day simply refuse to comply with a Supreme Court decision.
That suggestion will be regarded as shocking, but it should not be. To the objection that a rejection of a court's authority would be civil disobedience, the answer is that a court that issues orders without authority engages in an equally dangerous form of civil disobedience.
I don't think he'll any more subscribe to that, however, nor his admirers, once they hold the throne. Somehow, I just have that doubtful feeling these days.
[partial transcript of 1988 video]
Interviewer:
You were appointed by Ed Meese. Were you part of what liberals would call the Meese/Bork/Charles Freed/William Bradford Reynolds crowd in the Justice Department?
Alito:
Well, I think that's kind of a pejorative way of putting it. I - I agree with many of the things they attempted to do, but I'd prefer to discuss it issue by issue than on the basis of labels.
Interviewer:
Well, did you think Robert Bork should have been confirmed for the Supreme Court?
Alito:
I certainly thought he should have been. I think he was one of the most outstanding nominees of the century.
Interviewer:
Why? --How?
Alito:
He was a man of unequalled - he *is* a man of unequaled intellectual ability, understanding of constitutional history, someone who had thought deeply thorugh his entire life about constitutional issues and about the supreme Court and the role that it ought to play in American society. And I think that if the public had accurately understood what the positions that he, ah, the positions that he holds and made those wishes known to their elected representatives, that he would have been overwhelmingly confirmed, but I think through a sort of a fluke about the way the nomination came up, and the kind of campaign that was mounted against him, he was unjustifiably rejected.
[There's plenty more weaseling and unctuousness in that little interview - Uriah Heep is alive and well and oiling his way through the courts of the land. Charles Fried is another "old conservative" openly defending the current Bushco surveillance policy, btw, while teaching law at Harvard. Meese was the sketchy Attorney General under ethically-challenged president Reagan and VP Bush I.]