When it comes to enthusiasts of unaccountable presidential power, it's generally hard to find anyone more willing to shake the pompoms for an unrestrained executive branch overriding the depleted engine of checks and balances than former Bush Justice Department official John Yoo. But now, President Barack Obama wants to use an executive order to do something about guns, and it's got Yoo all hot and bothered about the boundaries, man, what about the boundaries?
It's a bit of a break with the hoodoo that Yoo brewed in support of his previous presidential employer, who saw constitutional limitations as an impediment to prosecuting the "War on Terror." Yoo's work in support of the idea that there are "no limits on the Executive's judgment" provided the Bush administration with an abundance of material to deploy whenever the need arose to underpin their theories with some official-sounding lawyer-speak.
It's worth pointing out that the Obama administration's own adventures in John Yoo's Quasi-Constitutional Phantom Zone led to further innovations, like that time they straight up killed an American citizen without due process, just to demonstrate that they could, and then went back and killed the guy's son for reasons that amounted to "that's what you get, for having a dad like that." (Never let it be said that Donald Trump's ideas are original!)
On that particular occasion, Yoo cheered Obama from the ramparts of the Wall Street Journal opinion page. But Obama's executive order on guns has suddenly got Yoo's garters all a-pop in a brief post Wednesday at The Federalist, in which he offers advice about who might have the best standing to bring suit in federal court against the order.
Just to be clear, Yoo has deftly identified the ideal plaintiff in such a case -- "someone who may occasionally sell a gun, but is not really running a retail business." That's not an issue. It's just ... so strange to see him writing to undermine his life's work, like so:
Such a case would prompt not just a good challenge to the scope of the President's authority to interpret the law, on which the Supreme Court has been signaling that it may shift away from deference to the executive branch, but also the scope of the Second Amendment and the federal government's regulatory powers.
So, hooray, John Yoo has finally found an instance in which the unlimited judgment of the president really needs to have a limitation. It's an ironically funny additional note to be reminded that the Supreme Court is only getting around to feeling its oats about executive power nowadays. Like they say, timing is everything.
Jason Linkins edits "Eat The Press" for The Huffington Post and co-hosts the HuffPost politics podcast, "So, That Happened." Subscribe here. Listen to the latest episode below.