Neal Katyal has been appointed Deputy Solicitor General. He's a professor at Georgetown (or GW, I forget) who argued the Hamdan cases in the Supreme Court. He has also been on PBS excoriating Bush for his lack of understanding of the rule of law. His appointment is a sure guarantee that the Bush system of secret detention and kangaroo trials is coming to an end.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
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4 comments:
This appointment and others like it are why I voted for Obama in the Caucus.
Does this sort of appointment increase the chances of review of decisions made by the Bush administration? I get the impression that impeachment of Bush was off the cards, so does that mean review is too? (Must go and look up impeachment too: I'm not sure if that term refers only to sitting officials...)
Yes, SH--impeachment applies only to sitting officials. At this point that's obviously off the table. Bush, Cheney, and lesser officials could conceivably be indicted for any crimes they committed while in office, however.
But I think we have to be careful to distinguish things like incompetence, nastiness, lying, and horrendously bad policy decisions from actual criminal behavior. Things like torture and extraordinary rendition may rise to the level of actual crimes, but I am not sure if anything else would.
Does ignoring laws because they don't suit you count? I seem to recall a few occasions where things were simply brushed away.
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