Sunday, November 13, 2005
(8:26 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Barely Legal
The fear-mongering about legislating from the bench is a distraction from the real problem: legislating from the White House. The same people who think lunatic judges are enforcing a dictatorship of relativism, etc., don't seem to be bothered by the fact that "unlawful combatant" is not an actual category in international law, nor that the Bush administration has basically arbitrarily declared that the War on Terror is a "new kind of war" (despite the fact that we're still only ever invading other sovereign nations), nor that the president is somehow found to have arbitrary powers "inherent in himself," nor that we somehow have the sole prerogative of interpreting UN Security Council resolutions even when basically every other member of the Security Council thinks our interpretation is wrong -- I could go on.I'm not saying this is completely unprecedented in US history -- we've had a trend toward greater concentration of power in the executive for quite some time now, and some of the abuses that are now running rampant (such as extraordinary rendition) were started under Clinton. Still, if anyone other than the Legislative branch is going to have the power to decide on the validity and application of laws, I'd really prefer that it be the powerless judges, rather than the branch of government that has direct control over the armed forces and intelligence agencies.
