Just Say No to Harold Koh!

Obama is just flaunting his power now. He's decided he's going to damn well do what he wants and is challenging anyone to stop him.

Harold Koh isn't even border line acceptable for this position. It will be a travesty of justice, and also an assault on our justice system if his nomination is approved.

His nomination is finally getting some traction in the news. The Senators that vote to approve his nomination may be voting themselves right out of office. I believe the American people have had way too much of Obama shoving his extreme left, socialistic agenda down their throats. The American people are finally starting to pay attention. I believe that this time around, they will remember these things next time they enter the voting booth.
Rees

The Long Arm of the Law
A looming battle over the role foreign judges should play in U.S. courts.
from Newsweek
By Stuart Taylor Jr. and Evan Thomas
Published Apr 18, 2009

Koh argues that American law should reflect "transnational" legal values—and that in an interconnected world it inevitably does to some extent already. In his writings, Koh has campaigned to expand some rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution—and perhaps shrink some others, including the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech—to better conform to the laws of other nations.

But Koh would go much further. To show regard for "the opinions of mankind," he asserted in a 2002 law review article, the death penalty "should, in time, be declared unconstitutional." Were his writings to become policy, judges might have the power to use debatable interpretations of treaties and "customary international law" to override a wide array of federal and state laws affecting matters as disparate as the redistribution of wealth and prostitution. He has campaigned to write into U.S. law the United Nations "Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women," signed by President Carter in 1980 but never ratified by Congress. A U.N. committee supervising the treaty's implementation has called for the "decriminalizing of prostitution" in China, the legalization of abortion in Colombia, and the abolition of Mother's Day in Belarus (for "encouraging woman's traditional roles"). In 2002 Senate testimony, Koh stressed that these reports are not binding law, and he dismissed as "preposterous" the notion that the treaty would "somehow require the United States to abolish Mother's Day." Still, the reports are very much part of the "transnational" legal process that Koh celebrates.

Still, conservatives have a point that Koh and the other "transnationalists" are using their legal theories to advance a political agenda. The international legal norms they wish to inject into American law by and large reflect the values of Social Democratic Europe and liberal American academics. Koh is not suggesting, for instance, that American judges adapt Islamic law that discriminates against women. Koh's writings—especially when exaggerated—will add to charges from the right that Obama is a closet socialist. The president may have to answer whether he agrees with Koh's more provocative views.
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