One week after Congress held the first hearing in 41 years on the president’s authority to order the use of nuclear weapons, two of Columbia Law School’s leading scholars of war powers and the Constitution discussed what’s at stake before a large audience at the New-York Historical Society in Manhattan. During the Nov. 21 event, Philip Bobbitt, the Herbert Wechsler Professor of Federal Jurisprudence, and Matthew Waxman, the Liviu Librescu Professor of Law, discussed war powers and the presidency, including a proposal by Waxman that would constrain the president’s authority to order a nuclear first strike. The proposal, which Waxman has been developing with Richard Betts, a professor at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, aims to reform nuclear launch procedures. Under the proposal, the secretary of defense would need to affirm that a nuclear first-strike order is valid and the attorney general would need to certify that it is legal.
Of course, a republic can’t run without authorities who follow the rule of law. Civil disobedience by citizens can be an important challenge to corrupt or immoral politicians, but when corporate leaders themselves start breaking the law in their own narrow interests, societal order breaks down. Polishing their left-libertarian veneer, the on-demand economy firms now flouting basic employment and anti-discrimination laws would like us to believe that they follow in the footsteps of Gandhi’s passive resistance, rather than segregationists’ massive resistance. But their wealthy, powerful, nearly-all-white-and-male cast of chief executives come far closer to embodying, rather than fighting, “the man”.
January 2, 2001 MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS from Project for the New American Century On the last day of 2000, President Clinton signed the International Criminal Court convention...The president did so, he said, in order to put the U.S. in a position
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By Lucy Madison / CBS News/ June 12, 2013 Snowden appeals to the libertarian right - he voted for Ron Paul. ""It's a shame that we are in an age where people who tell the truth about what the government is doing gets into trouble," he said. Ron Paul: "What about the people who destroy our Constitution?... What do we think about people who assassinate American citizens without trials and assume that that's the law of the land? That's where our problem is. Our problem isn't with people who are trying to tell us the truth about what's happening."