John Yoo, who believes that presidents are sometimes empowered to order the massacre of a village or the crushing of a child's testicles, has a post up at Ricochet arguing that president Obama "misunderstands his constitutional role" and "continues to display his misunderstanding of the constitutional order." How?
...by repeatedly inserting himself into matters reserved to the states and localities, such as the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, the location of a mosque near ground zero in New York City, and much of Arizona's immigration bill.
And by "inserting himself," Yoo means that he comments on them. It's certainly reasonable to argue that Obama shouldn't comment on these matters. It's just a little much coming from a man whose legal reasoning about a president's constitutional role allowed a president to seize any citizen or non-citizen at will anywhere on earth and torture them. Here's Yoo's credentials, according to his own former overseers:
The ethics lawyers, in the Office of Professional Responsibility, concluded that two department lawyers involved in analyzing and justifying waterboarding and other interrogation tactics Jay S. Bybee, now a federal judge, and John C. Yoo, now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley had demonstrated “professional misconduct.” It said the lawyers had ignored legal precedents and provided slipshod legal advice to the White House in possible violation of international and federal laws on torture.
Even the man who rescued Yoo from being disbarred conceded that "Yoo’s loyalty to his own ideology and convictions clouded his view of his obligation to his client and led him to author opinions that reflected his own extreme, albeit sincerely held, view of executive power."
So naturally he now makes his living as a law professor and is taken seriously as a pundit writing on the subject of the executive's role in government. And can actually say that merely speaking out on a topic of public debate, a president is constitutional over-reach! And naturally, Paul Wolfowitz has the gall to call for invading another Middle East country. And Don Rumsfeld refuses to cop to his own war crimes. If you are a part of the partisan right, nothing matters except your team.