Monday, April 09, 2007

Re: Damascus Nancy

Andrew C. McCarthy at NRO chimes in on Scooter's thoughts about Damascus Nancy, and goes a great deal beyond my analysis of the violation of the Logan Act:

It is settled beyond peradventure that the authority of the United States over the conduct of foreign relations rests exclusively with the executive branch. As John Marshall, later to become the nation’s most important Chief Justice, famously observed, “The President is the sole organ of the nation in its external affairs, and its sole representative with foreign nations.… The [executive] department is entrusted with the whole foreign intercourse of the nation.” In 1936, the Supreme Court explicitly acknowledged in its Curtiss-Wright Export decision, the “delicate, plenary and exclusive power of the President as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations[.]”

I agree with McCarthy that this is about teaching and not prosecuting; why prosecute politics? This is a very "teachable" moment but moments are fleeting.

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