Round em up..

When I started this blog 360 posts ago, I began with a comment about Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo, basically noting that at the core of the Bush Administration's dark heart there were lawyers that were willing to justify imperious and illegal activities in order to support the franchise and curry favor with the fearmongers and "Mayberry Machiavellis" in the White House.

Brad Delong brings us up to speed on how the tide is turning against the actions of Yoo and the Office of Legal Council (OLC). The legal fraternity is slowly warming up to the idea that was clear to so many all along, that Yoo's work was an aggressive and conscious attempt to undermine our Constitution and he, Gonzales and men like David Addington were quite willing to shred 300 years of precedent to further their hateful agenda.

He quotes Brian Tamanaha, who belatedly arrives at this conclusion:

But the recent release by the OLC of several of the relevant memos removes any doubt: these memos were elaborate exercises in manipulative legal argument.... OLC lawyers were faced with a big hurdle: the applicable law was directly contrary to what the Administration wanted to do. (That’s the thing about law—it can get in the way.) Rather than concede that the actions were illegal and could not be done, however, the lawyers constructed a covering legal analysis which arrived at the desired ends. The soundness of their legal argument did not matter. What mattered was that OLC has the power to issue legal opinions that are authoritative for immediate purposes (within the executive branch) and the mere issuance of the opinion supplied the first part of the “good faith” excuse described above (providing a defense to those who directly engaged in the illegal conduct).

Tamanaha highlights on representative conclusion of an OLC memo penned by Yoo:

The courts have observed that even the use of deadly force is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment if used in self-defense or to protect others. Here, for Fourth Amendment purposes, the right to self-defense is not that of an individual, but that of the nation and of its citizens. If the government’s heightened interest in self defense justifies the use of deadly force, then it would certainly also justify warrantless searches.

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, quoth Barry Goldwater.


I guess you had to be something other than a lawyer to see that the intent was pure evil all along.