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Torture Architect John Yoo
Hypocritically Blasts Democratic Party For Violating Constitution’s
Intent
Think
Progress
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
In today’s Wall Street Journal, former Justice Department
official John
Yoo blasts the Democratic party for its “undemocratic”
system of superdelegates:
This delegate dissonance wasn’t anything the
Framers of the U.S. Constitution dreamed up. They believed
that letting Congress choose the president was a dreadful idea.
Without direct election by the people, the Framers said that
the executive would lose its independence and vigor and become
a mere servant of the legislature. They had the record of revolutionary
America to go on. All but one of America’s first state
constitutions gave state assemblies the power to choose the
governor. James Madison commented that this structure allowed
legislatures to turn governors into “little more than
ciphers.”
Since when did Yoo
become so concerned with the Constitution? During his time in
the administration, he aggressively urged the administration to
push moral, ethical, and legal boundaries:
– Yoo was the author of the administration’s
infamous torture memo, which argued that interrogation
techniques only constituted torture if they are “equivalent
in intensity to…organ failure, impairment of bodily function,
or even death.” [Link,
Link]
(Article continues below)
–Thanks to Yoo’s legal work, the Bush administration
justified the creation of a new category of detainees: “illegal
enemy combatants.”¯ He advised that President
Bush did not have to comply with the Geneva Conventions
in handling detainees in the war on terror. [Link]
– Yoo argued that President Bush “didn’t
need to ask Congress for permission to invade Iraq.”
The 1973 War Powers Resolution, according to Yoo, is “irrelevant.”¯
[Link]
– Yoo helped craft the legal justification allowing
the Bush administration to secretly eavesdrop on Americans without
court-approved warrants. In 2001, Yoo brushed aside
constitutional concerns, stating that after 9/11, “the
government may be justified in taking measures which in less
troubled conditions could be seen as infringements of individual
liberties.”[Link]
Additionally, despite what Yoo claims, the Founders never envisioned
“direct election by the people.” In fact, during the
Constitutional Convention, “a plan to have the president
elected directly by the people was
defeated twice.”
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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