Fox News Senior Judicial Analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano said Wednesday it was incredible that the Justice Department reached back to a short-term Reconstruction-era presidential appointment to legitimize President Trump's decision to make former Iowa federal prosecutor Matt Whitaker the acting U.S. attorney general.
"I'm very disappointed to see lawyers who work for Matthew Whitaker go back to 1866 and look for a precedent [to keep him in his job]."
"I don't care what happened in 1866," Napolitano said. "Congress changed the law in the 1960s."
Napolitano said the Justice Department pointed to President Andrew Johnson's appointment of American Bar Association co-founder J. Hubley Ashton to serve what ended up being a six-day stint as the nation's top law enforcement officer. Ashton, like Whitaker, was never confirmed by the Senate.
This is extremely disappointing. The idea that partisanship isn't involved in every interpretation of the Constitution and other law is a joke. There shouldn't be government rules, Constitution on down, it should all be about the PPS.
That said, the PPS is not about to be demanded by the masses anytime soon. In the current world, it is all about realpolitik and for a libertarian that means support for measures and events that move us toward liberty. Since the acting attorney general appears to be anti-Fed and pro-gold, he appears to be about as good as libertarians are going to find at the present time heading the DOJ, he should not be shot down.
Find the best positive arguments that can be made about him, or otherwise shut up, should be libertarian strategy.
The attack on Whitaker by Napolitano is what you get from technocratic "libertarians" rather than true libertarians.
-RW
(Source: Fox News)
As much as I love Judge Nap, I have never 100% trusted him. There is always a "what about" floating in the background because he had to enforce unjust laws for so long as a judge. The problem with him as that I do not know where his red lines are or what his basic principles are. I can tell a general area where they might be, but they are blurry. With Ron Paul though, even though I don't fully agree with his red lines, I know where they are so I trust him more. I'd still like to see him on the Supreme Court though.
ReplyDeleteI am certainly not an advocate for the Constitution but maybe the Judge wants to follow it at all times rather than flip-flopping to the advantage of freedom. This gives the other side an excuse to do the same against freedom.
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