Yoo claims he ‘helped save Obama’s presidency’

By GottaLaff

Yoo gotta be kidding!

In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal Wednesday titled "My Gift to the Obama Presidency," Yoo declared that he "may have just helped save [Obama's] presidency. How? By winning a drawn-out fight to protect his powers as commander in chief to wage war and keep Americans safe."

First John McCain claims Obama suspended his 2008 campaign, too.

Then someone on ClusterFox blames Obama for Nevada's domestic violence.

Now this? Concocting legal justification for abuse of power, and abuse of humans, is nothing to boast about, Sparky. And the only think you've managed to save is your own ass.

Yet another WTF moment. Welcome to Opposite World.

Bush appointees buck Obama's executive authority

By GottaLaff

Where were they when Boy Georgie was swaggering around with his red holster and spinning his little pretend pearl-handled six-guns?

President Barack Obama’s claims of broad executive authority to carry out the war on terror are drawing fire from an unexpected source: federal judges nominated by President George W. Bush, who asserted the sweeping powers in the first place.

In recent weeks, three different Bush appointees considering cases relating to war-on-terror detainees have rejected arguments from Obama’s Justice Department, which adopted virtually unchanged the positions the Bush administration had staked out.

In each case, the Bush-appointed judge said the executive branch was overstepping its authority and claiming more powers than the law allowed.

“It took a while for the courts to turn on George Bush. Obama’s not getting that same period,” said Jonathan Turley, a liberal legal analyst at The George Washington University. “The fact that these are Republican appointees tends to add an exclamation point to their decisions.”

“Even Republican judges are seeing through the arguments and the idea that the war on terror justified depriving prisoners of constitutional protections,” said Jonathan Hafetz of the American Civl Liberties Union.[...]

For seven years, the Bush administration, in tandem with Congress, were able to stop any judge from actually looking at the evidence” in detainee cases, Hafetz said. “They’re finding that the emperor has no clothes and the detentions lack evidentiary support.”[...]

Even after the stinging defeats, the Obama Justice Department is continuing to fight at least two of the rulings. Government lawyers requested and received a stay of Bates’s decision on habeas rights at Bagram.

H/t: Cody

Will Obama Use His Supreme Court Pick to Solidify Executive Power?

By GottaLaff

Will Obama Use His Supreme Court Pick to Solidify Executive Power?

That’s the shrewd question that Charlie Savage raises in his “Washington Memo” Monday in The New York Times. Looking beyond the usual liberal-conservative splits on social issues like abortion, gun control and gay rights, Savage considers how President Obama’s choice of Supreme Court justice — likely to be named any day now – might influence the president’s claims to broad executive authority. And the choice of who will replace Justice David Souter “could be terribly consequential, ” as New York University Law Professor David Golove puts it, because so many of the court’s rulings on executive power have been by a margin of five to four.

Follow the link above to read on.

Arlen Specter Moves to Curb Executive Branch Powers

It's from Roll Call which is subscription only, but I thought I'd let you start your day with a little "Where The Hell Were They The Past 8 Years?" Refreshing!

Senate Judiciary ranking member Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) on Thursday introduced a trio of bills aimed at curbing executive branch powers, including new controls on the use of presidential signing statements and electronic surveillance.

Joshua is angry

By GottaLaff

I love the Joshua Blog. Joshua is a cool guy who is responsive to my Tweets on The Twitter Machine. I went over to his place, and I found a very angry Joshua. He has graciously invited me to copy and paste his entire post:

Now I'm really starting to get pissed off. What the hell is he thinking?! He refused to go after Bush officials for torture, he embraces Bush's executive power grab and protects the domestic spying program and it's telecom conspirators, blackmailed by the Senate GOPers with filibusters his appointees & threatened by the CIA with God only know what, he decides not to release the torture memos as planned and now this bullshit?!

From the NY Times:

Obama to Appeal Detainee Ruling

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said Friday that it would appeal a district court ruling that granted some military prisoners in Afghanistan the right to file lawsuits seeking their release. The decision signaled that the administration was not backing down in its effort to maintain the power to imprison terrorism suspects for extended periods without judicial oversight.

In a court filing, the Justice Department also asked District Judge John D. Bates not to proceed with the habeas-corpus cases of three detainees at Bagram Air Base outside Kabul, Afghanistan. Judge Bates ruled last week that the three — each of whom says he was seized outside of Afghanistan — could challenge their detention in court.

Tina Foster, the executive director of the International Justice Network, which is representing the detainees, condemned the decision in a statement.

“Though he has made many promises regarding the need for our country to rejoin the world community of nations, by filing this appeal, President Obama has taken on the defense of one of the Bush administration’s unlawful policies founded on nothing more than the idea that might makes right,” she said.

read more

NOT OK.

Joshua has a point. I really don't want to get this upset with President Obama, he's really terrific in so many ways... but regarding these topics, I'm starting to simmer. I'm still in wait-and-see mode before I get to the same boiling point as Joshua, but right now, I don't like what I'm seeing while I wait.

Let's hope there's more to this than meets the eye, and that we will feel some sense of relief, not dread or vindication for our outrage.

Justices Limit Authority of President on Detainees

By GottaLaff

All these court cases are starting to fuse together in my pea brain:

The Supreme Court on Friday erased a lower-court ruling on perhaps the most fundamental national security question of all: Does the president have the power to order the indefinite military detention of legal residents of the United States?

The court’s action, which had been urged by the Obama administration, wiped away one of the Bush administration’s greatest victories in the lower courts, a 2008 ruling that expanded the limits of executive authority to combat terrorism by allowing such detentions.

But the one-paragraph Supreme Court ruling leaves open the question of whether the military detention of legal residents as enemy combatants can ever be constitutional. The ruling came in the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar who was lawfully in the United States as a student when he was arrested in 2001. The court, which had agreed to hear Mr. Marri’s challenge to his detention in December, said it would not hear the case after all in light of his indictment last week on criminal charges in federal court. [...]

The American Civil Liberties Union, which represents Mr. Marri, had hoped the Supreme Court would consider his case even after his indictment. But Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer for Mr. Marri, expressed satisfaction with the justices’ decision to undo the Fourth Circuit ruling.

“The fact that the government did not defend its previously claimed detention power and that the Supreme Court wiped out the legally bankrupt lower-court ruling,” Mr. Hafetz said, “should make clear that in the United States no president can imprison legal residents or American citizens without charges or trial by calling them ‘enemy combatants.’ ”

While the government did not defend its power to detain Mr. Marri at present, it left open the possibility that he or others might be subject to military detention as enemy combatants in the future. “Any future detention — were that hypothetical possibility ever to occur — would require new consideration under then-existing circumstances and procedure,” the Justice Department told the court in a brief filed Wednesday.

The government did take pains to deny that it was manipulating the legal system, an accusation made against the Bush administration when it moved Jose Padilla from military detention to criminal court in 2007.

Obama Clings to Extraordinary Executive Power

By GottaLaff

At TPC, most of us are pretty supportive of President Obama. But we are also not adverse to calling him out when we don't like what we see. This is one of those times:

Now that the Obama administration has decided to transfer al-Marri out of the South Carolina Navy brig — where he’s been imprisoned without charge for the last seven years — and charge him in federal court, the habeas corpus petition the American Civil Liberties Union filed on al-Marri’s behalf would seem to be moot. After all, the ACLU had asked for their client to be transferred to civilian custody and charged in a regular court. The Department of Justice did just that Feb. 27, charging al-Marri under federal criminal law with providing material support to al-Qaeda.

The Obama Justice Department now asks the Supreme Court to dismiss al-Marri’s appeal. But if the court agrees, it would leave in place the court of appeals’ ruling that the federal government has the right to hold a lawful U.S. resident in prison without charge indefinitely, as long as the president designates him an “enemy combatant.” The court could, alternatively, vacate the Fourth Circuit’s decision, but that would leave the question undecided, except in the district of South Carolina where the court ruled that the government did not have that extraordinary power.

All of which raises the obvious question: Why Is the Obama administration clinging to the right to hold lawful U.S. residents indefinitely without charge on U.S. soil? [...]

In asking the Supreme Court to dismiss al-Marri’s case, the Obama administration wrote that the possibility that al-Marri will be re-designated an enemy combatant and therefore subject to indefinite detention is a “subjective fear” that is “remote and speculative.” But still possible. [...]

So the government reserves the right to use evidence from his criminal trial to re-classify al-Marri as an “enemy combatant” subject to indefinite detention?

The ACLU, which is representing al-Marri, is pleased that the Obama administration transferred him out of military custody. But now they’re left arguing that the Supreme Court should hear a case that, as a practical matter, doesn’t really exist anymore. [...]

As Jonathan Haftez, the lead ACLU lawyer on the appeal, explained earlier today, the Obama Justice Department has “refused to defend an illegal policy. But they have not explicitly repudiated the domestic detention powers. They should have done that.”

Am I missing something?