I'm not suggesting a read of the linked Greenwald post but this short passage and the articles it links is very interesting: In the 1990s, John Yoo attacked President Clinton for abusing executive power; today, he attacks President Obama for doing so; in between, when there was a GOP President, he essentially insisted that Presidents were omnipotent. This is the sort of party-in-power-dependent hackery that is nothing short of loathsome, and that’s equally true when it occurs in the other direction.
Now, the article about Obama is not about war powers and so it doesn't necessarily conflict with Yoo's position regarding Bush administration anti-terror policies, but it is extremely difficult to reconcile the Yoo of the Bush years with the Yoo of the Clinton years. He literally accuses liberals of blind partisanship for making the sort of arguments about Clinton that he later makes about Bush. People do change their minds, but I think this is an important datapoint in terms of understanding the legal wranglings of the Bush years. John Yoo partisan hypocrisy |