Bush's World War Too

The WSJ has done a splendid job of piecing and parsing the legal arguments that Bush tried to run up to support his "war powers". Regrettably, in its lead story, it characterizes this putsch as a "legal miscalculation". Guambat is quite certain, though only by prejudice because he has not been confided in by the Bushies, that it was a calculated stretch of the envelope and hardly a miscalculation; the only miscalculation was that the neocons hadn't packed the courts fully enough with his acolytes to rubber-stamp their ideology.

Fortunately, in its sidebar presentation, the authors frankly note,

"The justices did not do this in a cursory fashion but in detailed historical lessons intended to ensure that no future president gets the wartime precedents so wrong."

The lead story says,

even the conservatives have chided him. A 1948 decision, Hirota v. MacArthur, was a "slip of a case" that "cannot bear the weight the Government would place on it," sniffed Chief Justice John Roberts in a recent opinion. [Guambat doesn't find that the Chief Justice "sniffed" in the opinion, so that must just be editorial reportage. Strike it from the record, and the jury is instructed to disregard that characterisation.]

"The bottom line is that the court is not buying off on this concept of the global 'war' on terror," says retired Col. David Crane, a law professor at Syracuse University and former war crimes prosecutor.

The "interactive graphic" sidebar is full of the opinions, arguments and summaries that flesh out the debate. Guambat hopes it is available to you if you don't have a subscription. Since there are only a couple of readers of these posts, and that's being charitable, if you can't get through the subscription barrier, send Guambat an email, or leave a comment with your email contact, and Guambat will email the article(s) to you.