Charlie Savage at the Boston Globe says this ain’t far from dictatorship as Bush chooses which laws to enforce and which to ignore (more than 750 so far).
It seems to me that the president does have the authority to refuse to enforce laws he believes are unconstitutional. Which of us wouldn’t pardon all the drug and gun possession charges and threaten any federal prosecutor who files them in the future with prosecution for violating people’s rights on our first day in office?
The problem is that the laws he’s ignoring are all restrictions on his power which David Addington and Jay Bybee have informed him is unlimited. He is used his “inherent” and “plenery” powers of the commander in chief clause to “determine” that Afghanistan was a “failed state” so they could ignore the laws enforcing Geneva’s ban on torture, in this case, of suspected Taliban and al Qaeda members in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay and at God-knows-what “ghost prisons” around the world. This is the same “authority” which was later brought to the prison camps in Iraq such as Abu Ghraib.
He also seems to think that he’s got the authority to bomb Iran on his own whim.
Spooner was right, the constitution either created this mess or couldn’t stop it, either way it’s illegitimate now.
