Mukasey's Law

TownHall.com ^ | September 20, 2007 | George Will

[logician2u]

Michael Mukasey, the retired judge nominated to be attorney general, is called a "law and order" conservative. That description is, however, not especially informative now that the Bush administration's sweeping claims of presidential powers have unsettled some understandings of what the law is. The following questions, if asked at Mukasey's Senate confirmation hearings, might reveal whether he considers some of these claims extravagant.

-- The Bush administration says "the long war" -- the war on terror -- is a perpetual emergency that will last for generations. Waged against us largely by non-state actors, it will not end with a legally clarifying and definitive surrender. The administration regards America as a battlefield, on which even an American citizen can be seized as an "enemy combatant" and detained indefinitely. You ruled that presidents have this power, but you were reversed on appeal. What do you think was the flaw in the reasoning of the court that reversed you?

[logician2u]

Good questions, but who among present members of the Senate--let alone members of the Senate Judiciary Committee--is likely to ask so much as one of them?

George Will, contrarian that he is, would rather be right than friends with the President.

[gusopol3]

Could Bush correctly veto Webb's legislation on constitutional grounds?

Are there acts of Congress which the President is constitutionally barred from vetoing ?

[logician2u]

That would be a question for consitutional scholars.

The present question (moot, because the Senate has not voted in favor of Webb's bill) is whether the President can justify a veto on the spurious grounds that, as CIC, the President has exclusive warmaking power.

It would be an interesting case to present to the SC, but they will never get it.

[gusopol3]

if he says “correctly....on constitutional grounds” then he limits the playing field. If he wants to talk about justifying on any other grounds, then he needds to say so. IMHO, the question is not as clever as he apparently thinks it is. I suppose the Prez couldn’t veto his own impeachment, but it requires a veto-proof majority to vote for it anyway doesn’t it, even if it were a bill?

[logician2u]

We may have different interpretations of what George Will was getting at.

When he writes "correctly," I think he means "properly," or "in accordance with."

What you are implying, and outright asking in your first posting, is whether there are bills which the president cannot veto. I don't believe that to be the case, however a legal scholar may prove me wrong.

At any rate, that was not George Will's contention in the article.