March 31st 2009
Obama Names Sharia Fan As State’s Lawyer
In 2007, Harold Koh, dean of Yale’s law school, was heard telling a Yale Club gathering in New York that “in an appropriate case, he didn’t see any reason why sharia law would not be applied to govern a case in the United States.” Normally we’d laugh this off as more Yale liberal lunacy, but unfortunately we can’t.
Our president has named Koh to be the State Dept’s top attorney. What a nightmare!
It’s not just his view on Sharia, it’s his entire view on internationalism and the law. Koh doesn’t curry much to the U.S. constitution; he’s more enamored with whatever other countries are up to. Says the NYPost:
He’s a fan of “transnational legal process,” arguing that the distinctions between US and international law should vanish.
What would this look like in a practical sense? Well, California voters have overruled their courts, which had imposed same-sex marriage on the state. Koh would like to see such matters go up the chain through federal courts — which, in turn, should look to the rest of the world. If Canada, the European Human Rights Commission and the United Nations all say gay marriage should be legal — well, then, it should be legal in California too, regardless of what the state’s voters and elected representatives might say.
He even believes judges should use this “logic” to strike down the death penalty, which is clearly permitted in the US Constitution.
The primacy of international legal “norms” applies even to treaties we reject. For example, Koh believes that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child — a problematic document that we haven’t ratified — should dictate the age at which individual US states can execute criminals. Got that? On issues ranging from affirmative action to the interrogation of terrorists, what the rest of the world says, goes.
The dean of Yale Law can hold such views and it’s nasty, a good reason for alumns to stop sending checks off to New Haven, but they are not views that should be tolerated by State’s lead counsel. That position calls for a fierce and discliplined defender of the American system – or at least it did up until Obamarx rolled into town – and Koh is definitely not that guy:
Koh has called America’s focus on the War on Terror “obsessive.” In 2004, he listed countries that flagrantly disregard international law — “most prominently, North Korea, Iraq, and our own country, the United States of America,” which he branded “the axis of disobedience.”
He has also accused President George Bush of abusing international law to justify the invasion of Iraq, comparing his “advocacy of unfettered presidential power” to President Richard Nixon’s. And that was the first Bush — Koh was attacking the 1991 operation to liberate Kuwait, four days after fighting began in Operation Desert Storm.
Koh has also praised the Nicaraguan Sandinistas’ use in the 1980s of the International Court of Justice to get Congress to stop funding the Contras. Imagine such international lawyering by rogue nations like Iran, Syria, North Korea and Venezuela today, and you can see the danger in Koh’s theories.
Libs are gleeful at the appointment of course – not because they want Koh at State; no, because they want Koh on the Supreme Court. The Post reports he’s on a short list of candidates that Lib groups would submit to Obama for consideration once a seat on the court opens.
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April 15th, 2009 at 6:58 am
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