More on Yoo

When the Yoo torture memo was finally declassified last week (an act that's still not getting nearly the exposure it should), I saw a few commenters who mentioned the fact that he'd avoided to mention Youngstown Co. v Sawyer, a case decided by the Supreme Court more than fifty years ago. Not being a lawyer, I obviously didn't recognize the significance of that, but today, fortunately, looseheadprop at firedoglake spelled it all out for us. It's not been superceded by other case law or Supreme Court decisions, and it pretty much spells out the limits of presidential powers during wartime. I'm not going to quote anything because looseheadprop offers copious quotations, so you can follow the link to get as much as you want. You'll also quickly understand why Yoo didn't include it as a precedent for his legal theory about how the president could do anything he wanted to. It's because it blows his theory out of the water. I'm afraid that I'm too tired at the moment to be any more lucid than that right now, so you'll just have to make your own conclusion after reading it yourselves.