Obama joins legal forces with notorious John Yoo

Buzzfeed -  By ordering the military into action without explicit congressional authorization, Obama is falling back, at least in part, on the same controversial legal theories of executive power that he once rejected.

Not everyone is surprised by the presidential about-face. John Yoo, a former Bush administration lawyer and one of the primary architects of the “strong executive” theory of presidential power, told Buzz Feed News, “Obama has adopted the same view of war powers as the Bush administration.”

... The most obvious precedent for Obama’s claim of expansive Article II power is a memo written nearly 13 years ago by John Yoo, who is perhaps most well-known as the author of the so-called “torture memos.” Like Obama, then-President George W. Bush was looking for a way to use military force as a preemptive tool. Frustrated with a Congress that, even in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks refused to give the president preemptive power, Yoo came up with an innovative solution: He read it into the Constitution.

Relying on Article II, Yoo wrote: “The president may deploy military force preemptively against terrorist organizations or the States that harbor or support them, whether or not they can be linked to the specific terrorist attack of September 11.” The fact that Congress had explicitly rejected the preemption language didn’t matter because, in Yoo’s reading, the president already had that authority.

“This is precisely the logic of the current and planned use of force against [ISIS],” Jack Goldsmith, another former Bush administration lawyer and currently a professor at Harvard Law School, pointed out recently on Lawfare, a blog he co-founded.

Gary Kamiya, Salon, 2009 - You have to give John Yoo credit for chutzpah. The disgraced author of the so-called torture memo was back in the news last week, when the Obama administration released seven more secret opinions, all but one written in whole or in part by Yoo and fellow Office of Legal Counsel lawyer Jay Bybee, arguing that the Bush administration had the right to override the Constitution as long as it claimed to be fighting a "war on terror." . . .

Among the new memos is one written in 2001, in which Yoo and co-author Robert J. Delahunty advised the U.S. that the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids the Army to be used for law enforcement, and the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, do not apply to domestic military operations undertaken during a "war on terror."

In other words, bye-bye, Bill of Rights. This is a prescription for a police state, where not just the police but the Army can kick your door down without a warrant or probable cause, as long as the president says he's fighting "terror." . . . . . .

Last week, the unrepentant Yoo popped up in that impregnable redoubt of right-wing rogues, the Wall Street Journal's Op-Ed page, to defend himself and pour contempt on his opponents.

Yoo warns that if the Obama administration fails to do the same kind of "planning" -- more to the point, if it continues to "seriously pursue" officials like him who did that "planning" -- it will endanger America.