May the knowledge of this burn the antiwar movement’s soul like battery acid.
In some ways, John Yoo’s argument (“Antiwar Senator, War-Powers President“) is almost… superfluous. The basic point is straightforward enough: President Obama, just like every other President since 1973, has come to the conclusion that the War Powers Act is in fact an unconstitutional and onerous restriction on the executive branch’s constitutionally mandated oversight of military affairs. This conclusion follows the usual evolutionary arc: as Yoo helpfully points out, Senator Obama and Candidate Obama had a fairly different view of unilateral action than does the (theoretically) better-educated and (theoretically) more experienced President Obama. Couple that with the further detail that the usual Democratic suspects will not be trying to repeat with Libya their largely ineffectual push against the liberation of Iraq (Kuchinich and Dean, to give just two examples, have already been effectively whipped back into place), and one is left to conclude that there was a lot of deliberate lying about motivations being made over the last decade by the Democratic party.
Again, this is almost superfluous. John Yoo is arguing on Barack Obama’s behalf. His major complaint is that Obama’s doing a worse job than George W Bush did*.
John Yoo. The guy who did the waterboarding memos. Continue reading President Obama defended by John Yoo.