“The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need…”

In addition to being funny, DeLong’s anticipatory satire of Charles Krauthammer actually has a serious point: would Krauthammer, or any of the large number of conservative pundits who have endorsed the Yooian theory that the President’s Article II powers trump all other legal limits on the executive’s authority where “national security” is involved, have any principled way of not supporting the legality of the President’s actions if he decided that the 22nd Amendment was a luxury the country can’t afford during the War on Terra? After all, the Court used a similar logic to permit the President to engage in a clear violation of the 14th Amendment during WWII, and the most popular conservative blogger who writes a significant amount of original content has already written a book defending the decision. And that’s the problem with this reasoning: there’s no logical end to it. Even if we were to assume for the sake of argument that the President’s illegal wiretaps haven’t created any substantively major violations of civil liberties, the reasoning being used to pretend that they’re legal is incredibly dangerous. (And, of course, since the program isn’t transparent or subject to judicial oversight we have no basis for making this assumption.)

And while I don’t, of course, think that Bush actually would try to stay on for a third term, we actually have recent Republican precedent for such a thing: Saint Rudy trying to stay on past the expiration of his term through a legally dubious informal arrangement with the other candidates.

…Glenn Greenwald has more.