My former professor Michael Glennon, fled from his former digs to the Fletcher School, had a well-written, logically-argued rant published last month about the purportedly legal justification given by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) for the US military actions in Libya, and how it contradicted the prior denunciations by the One and his henchmen of unilateral presidential authority in foreign affairs. (This is the same office that gave a similar justification for waterboarding, etc., not being torture. Goose, gander, the sauce is all good.)
Anyway, his rant’s worth reading, because portions of his analysis still strike me as sound in many ways, but the funniest part was this:
Nor would one expect OLC to explain the stark contradictions between its position and the many earlier statements of top Administration officials. … But the credibility of the United States’ own domestic legal system is also at stake. Millions of people voted for “change we can believe in,†thinking that the election of 2008 meant an end to an era of extravagant claims of presidential power. The President, Vice President, Secretary of State and State Department Legal Adviser take an oath, after all, to support the United States Constitution, not the United Nations Charter. These officials bear a responsibility for maintaining the credibility of our system, which rests, in the end, upon the believability, reliability, and integrity of our highest constitutional officers. It’s not as though their earlier statements were made off-the-cuff, and it’s not as though these officials had no acquaintance with constitutional law. Their statements were deliberate, studied pronouncements by individuals schooled in the history and interpretation of the Constitution, with years of experience in the highest councils of government and legal education. What credibility costs are borne by the United States when the declarations of such officials – measured pronouncements on the meaning of the most fundamental precepts set out in the Constitution – turn out to be empty words?
Emphasis mine. Anyone who expected Obama to ask a Republican Congress for authority to go to war is smoking something. Aww, poor baby. Did the politicians (and Harold Koh) lie when they said they wholeheartedly supported your quixotic academic quest to resuscitate the 1973 War Powers Resolution? And for all those years, too.