With Friends Like These: Bush Lawyer John Yoo Backs Obama’s Undeclared War on ISIS

When President Barack Obama took the United
States to war against Libya in 2011 without first seeking
congressional authorization as required by the Constitution, he
disappointed more than a few of his liberal followers. But Obama
did earn the grudging respect of conservative law professor John
Yoo, the controversial former George W. Bush administration lawyer,

“torture memo” author, and Andrew Jackson
apologist. In response to Obama’s statement that he did not
need congressional approval to launch military action in Libya
thanks to his “constitutional authority to conduct U.S. foreign
relations” and his powers “as Commander in Chief and Chief
Executive,”
Yoo declared: “For once, Mr. Obama has the Constitution about
right.”

Fast-forward to the present day and Obama is once more planning
to wage war without first seeking authorization from Congress. And
once again, former Bush lawyer Yoo is standing in Obama’s corner.
“President Obama’s ‘strategy’ for fighting the Islamic state,” Yoo

recently wrote at National Review, “is coming under
fire from conservatives for lacking legal authority. I worry that
they are allowing their short-term political opposition to Obama
and his foreign policy to overcome the longer-term interest in
preserving the powers of the presidency.”

To his credit, Yoo is at least consistent. He wants the
president to enjoy virtually unlimited war powers and he maintains
that position regardless of which political party happens to occupy
the office. But to his discredit, Yoo’s stance is at odds with the
text of the Constitution, which plainly grants Congress—not the
president—the “power…to declare war.”

Back in 2008, when Obama was first seeking the White House, he
was widely seen as an antiwar candidate of “hope” and “change”
whose election would repudiate the foreign policy mistakes of the
Bush years. I think it’s safe to say that the ongoing Obama-Yoo
alliance has finally dispelled that myth.