A case-study in the responsibility of government or the corruption of power? Jack Goldsmith – no virgin in the brothel of legal defenders of presidential power – puts the velvet boot in:
Legal Advisor Harold Koh … spent his entire academic career studying and writing about presidential war powers, including the War Powers Resolution. Based on this academic record, one would not have expected Koh to push an unusually narrow interpretation of the WPR. Nor would one have expected him to have supported the original constitutional justification for unilateral presidential intervention in Libya. To get a flavor of what one might have expected, consider what Koh’s former colleague Bruce Ackerman said in support of his nomination to lead State-L:
This is the real importance of the Koh nomination. President Obama has selected one of the few lawyers who probed deeply into the constitutional implications of presidential unilateralism and how it might be controlled. Koh would be taking his position as legal adviser at one of the rare moments when it might be politically possible to consider a National Security Charter that aims to restore an effective system of checks and balances.
This is not how things have worked out. One wonders why.
Indeed one does. Goldsmith speculates here.
It seems to me that that Libya decision was a truly fateful one – a moment when the Obama administration briefly became the Clinton administration. Maybe this well-intended but rash and foolish intervention – egged on by the exact same crowd that gave us Iraq - was a function of the necessary compromises in making a primary runner-up such a powerful – and effective – figure in foreign policy. But for those of us who saw Obama as a corrective to the mindset of the Clintons and the Bushes, there is more than a little reason to feel abandoned – and anxious about the country and this presidency in this ill-begotten clusterfuck of a not-war.
(Photo: US State Department legal adviser Harold Koh (L) answers a question as he stands next to US Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner during a press conference following the United States' first review before the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council, on November 5, 2010 at the UN Offices in Geneva. By Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images.)
The Dish 