Alito of This, Alito of That... Then a Little Seltzer Down Your Pants

Er... Not that I've found anything about Judge Alito amusing thus far.

From The Boston Globe:

WASHINGTON -- In 1989, Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr. denounced the high court's decision that year upholding a Watergate-era law that allowed independent counsels to investigate wrongdoing in the White House, arguing that the decision amounted to a ''congressional pilfering" of presidential power.

Alito's remarks, made when he was US attorney for New Jersey, shed new light on his view of presidential power. Executive authority is an increasingly important area of the law in the era of the war on terrorism. President Bush has asserted the power to hold prisoners without trial, shield documents, and authorize aggressive interrogations without congressional approval.

Speaking at a convention marking an anniversary of the Bill of Rights, Alito endorsed the strong view of presidential power described by Justice Antonin Scalia, the only member of the court to vote against the independent counsel law, calling Scalia's opinion ''a brilliant but very lonely dissent." Scalia argued that no president should be subject to a prosecutor who is not also answerable to that president under the Constitution.

''The Supreme Court hit the doctrine of separation of powers about as hard as heavyweight champ Mike Tyson usually hits his opponents," Alito said of the court's decision upholding the independent counsel law, which was enacted in 1978 after the Watergate scandal. Congress allowed the law to expire in 1999.

We've seen what "presidential executive authority" gives us - faked wars, lots of death, stockpiles of debt (but the only WMD is ours), and zero accountability while the ultra rich get tax cuts and we get to watch the veterans come home to no benefits.