Dartblog

In what likely prompted equal measures of surprise, disgust, and horror in the hearts and minds of many New York Times op-ed page readers—both for the mere presence of the respective authors on that page and for the ideas they advance—was an interesting opinion piece by John Yoo and John Bolton. Yoo is a professor of law at UC Berkeley and, you will remember, was a Department of Justice attorney involved in advancing presidential prerogatives in the area of interrogation tactics. Bolton was, most recently and prominently, US ambassador to the United Nations and an outspoken critic of the excesses and issues in international law.

The crux of their argument is that President-elect Obama (and Democrats and Republicans in the Senate no matter how enamored they may be of Obama or his attempts at foreign policymaking) should insist on respect for the constitutional mandate of 2/3 approval by the Senate for ratifying treaties.

The piece is surprising because Bolton and Yoo, most especially the latter, have so egregiously and injuriously ignored procedural balance of power concerns and substantive issues of civil liberties in the past. I have a sneaking suspicion that if John McCain and a Republican Senate had been elected, the two may not have found the time quite so ripe for such a piece. But the fact that Bolton and Yoo are right here, for all their mistakes in the past and biases in the present, will most certainly place Obama-supporting, civil libertarians in to a bit of a pickle.