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| Obama's Most Perilous Legal Pick |
| 2009-03-31 |
| JUDGES should interpret the Constitution according to other nations' legal "norms." Sharia law could apply to disputes in US courts. The United States constitutes an "axis of disobedience" along with North Korea and Saddam-era Iraq. Those are the views of the man on track to become one of the US government's top lawyers: Harold Koh. President Obama has nominated Koh — until last week the dean of Yale Law School — to be the State Department's legal adviser. In that job, Koh would forge a wide range of international agreements on issues from trade to arms control, and help represent our country in such places as the United Nations and the International Court of Justice. It's a job where you want a strong defender of America's sovereignty. But that's not Koh. 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. Including, apparently, the world of radical imams. A New York lawyer, Steven Stein, says that, in addressing the Yale Club of Greenwich in 2007, Koh claimed 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." There's more frightening info on this guy at the link |
| Posted by:Sherry |
| #3 ugh. |
| Posted by: newc 2009-03-31 19:37 |
| #2 Beck's covering him today. Under the bus, Koh! |
| Posted by: Frank G 2009-03-31 13:45 |
| #1 Thank you everyone who voted for Obama. You will be responsible for the coming Civil War. |
| Posted by: DarthVader 2009-03-31 13:35 |