President Obama Above the Law

From Bad King George to Good King Barack - I still don't want a king.

Obama lawyers have been running around for weeks attempting one desperate, extreme measure after the next to prevent [the Al-Haramain case -- the only remaining case against the Government with any real chance of resulting in a judicial ruling on the legality of Bush's NSA warrantless eavesdropping program] from proceeding -- emergency appeals, requests for stays, and every time they lose, threats of still further appeals, this time to the U.S. Supreme Court.

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[T] he Obama DOJ has now lost -- twice -- in their attempts to invoke secrecy to stop this case from proceeding, but they just keep searching for a court to accept their claims.

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One of the worst abuses of the Bush administration was its endless reliance on vast claims of secrecy to ensure that no court could ever rule on the legality of the President's actions. They would insist that "secrecy" prevented a judicial ruling even when the President's actions were (a) already publicly disclosed in detail and (b) were blatantly criminal -- as is the case with the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program, which The New York Times described on its front page more than three years ago and which a federal statute explicitly criminalized. Secrecy claims of that sort -- to block judicial review of the President's conduct, i.e., to immunize the President from the rule of law -- provoked endless howls of outrage from Bush critics.

Yet now, the Obama administration is doing exactly the same thing. Hence, it is accurately deemed "a blow to the Obama administration" that a court might rule on whether George Bush broke the law when eavesdropping on Americans without warrants. Why is the Obama administration so vested in preventing that from happening, and -- worse still -- in ensuring that Presidents continue to have the power to invoke extremely broad secrecy claims in order to block courts from ruling on allegations that a President has violated the law?

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Manifestly, the Obama DOJ has one goal and one goal only here: to prevent any judicial ruling as to whether the Bush NSA warrantless eavesdropping program was illegal. And they're engaging in extraordinary efforts to ensure that occurs.

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Obama DOJ has undertaken exactly the same mission as the Bush DOJ for years so successfully carried out: namely, ensuring that Presidents remain above the law by invoking patently absurd claims of secrecy to argue that our National Security cannot withstand judicial rulings on whether the President's actions were, in fact, illegal.

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Our nation's most transparent administration in history won't bother to explain why they're doing any of this: "A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment."

  Glenn Greenwald

I seem to recall that Obama told us even before his election that virtually unlimited Presidential power was okay as long the President is a good and wise man, which presumably he was offering himself to be.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.