It’s not just a numbnut lawyer in the administration who thinks that bombing a sovereign state doesn’t count as “hostilities”; the president himself, a legal super genius we were assured, buys this “argument.” Perhaps if I’d been smart enough to go to Harvard I could be convinced of such nonsense, but I’m just a dumb Texas lawyer who is naive enough to believe that bombing a country is a hostile act.
This statement from a spokesman is much more revealing than it was intended to be:
It should come as no surprise that there would be some disagreements, even within an administration, regarding the application of a statute that is nearly 40 years old to a unique and evolving conflict.
Everything’s “unique” to this administration. The recession of 2008-09 was “unique” so it justified porkulus and our lengthy spending binge. Healhtcare is a “unique” market, so according to the administration’s arguments in court it can be the subject of unique government controls. And now a war in which we’re bombing another country is “unique” because . . . well . . . I guess it’s unique because it’s only the third time we’ve attacked Libya? Can anyone think of an actual way in which this war is “unique”?
The rule of law is premised on the fact that almost nothing is truly unique. There are rules, and they apply whether you like them or not. You may think you’re special, but the law, frankly, doesn’t give a damn. Simply saying that a situation is “unique” and therefore not subject to the normal rules is an argument for nothing less than despotism – in a world in which the guy with all the power gets to determine when the rules that limit his power don’t apply, it’s not obvious to me that the law still exists.
P.S. Think about this sentence: “A sticking point for some skeptics was whether any mission that included firing missiles from drone aircraft could be portrayed as not amounting to hostilities.”
Work through it word by word and think about it.
Posted by Apollo in CHANGE!, The Law Is An Ass--An Idiot, To the Shores of Tripoli