Amanda at Think Progress pointed out Monday that The Wall Street Journal’s Op-Ed was hosting a column by John Yoo, the apologist for torture who was a Justice Department lawyer from 2001-03 and now parks his butt at the American Enterprise Institute when he isn’t teaching law at Berkeley. Yoo was doing some bellyaching about the Democratic Party’s "undemocratic" system of superdelegates:
This delegate dissonance wasn’t anything the Framers of the U.S. Constitution dreamed up. They believed that letting Congress choose the president was a dreadful idea. Without direct election by the people, the Framers said that the executive would lose its independence and vigor and become a mere servant of the legislature. They had the record of revolutionary America to go on. All but one of America’s first state constitutions gave state assemblies the power to choose the governor. James Madison commented that this structure allowed legislatures to turn governors into "little more than ciphers." |
Amanda wrote:
... "despite what Yoo claims, the Founders never envisioned "direct election by the people." In fact, during the Constitutional Convention, "a plan to have the president elected directly by the people was defeated twice." |
Of this column
digby inquired:
Could somebody please tell me again how the electoral college is democratic, because back in 2000 something weird happened and I got all confused.
Without even commenting on the ludicrousness of Yoo a) worrying about the Democratic party's nominating process and b) worrying about the constitution, it's obvious that what Yoo conceives as the framers' vision was an elected dictatorship. |
Well, what can one expect from somebody who - as Andrew Sullivan
reminded us - thinks it's OK to crush a child’s testicles? Asked at a Dec. 1, 2005, debate with Professor Doug Cassel if there was any law preventing the President from doing such crushing, Yoo
replied:
I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that. |
There was a time, well maybe not at the
Journal, when any self-respecting editor would put a lot of distance between his newspaper’s pages and the scribblings of a fellow like that.
Days since Mission Accomplished, the "end of major combat operations in Iraq": 1793
Percentage of fatalities of Americans in uniform since Mission Accomplished: 96.5
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