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Sunstein An Advisor To Barack Obama?

By Big Tent Democrat

AdamB announced his law panel for Netroots Nation and it is an impressive one. But one thing stuck out for me in his announcement - the bio of Cass Sunstein:

One of America's foremost legal scholars, Cass Sunstein is a professor at Harvard Law School and a visiting professor at The University of Chicago Law School, and serves as an advisor to Obama for America.

Cass Sunstein is an advisor for Obama for America? That is extremely troubling as Cass Sunstein holds views that I believe should be anathema to most progressives. For example, Sunstein supported John Roberts for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court:

The Roberts nomination is not welcomed by those who object to the rightward drift of the federal courts or believe that Justice O'Connor's successor should be no more conservative than she. . . . But at this point in our history, the most serious danger lies in the rise of conservative judicial activism. . . For those who are concerned about that kind of activism on the Supreme Court, opposition to the apparently cautious Judge Roberts seems especially odd at this stage. . .

I wonder if Sunstein still agrees with that. More importantly, what does Obama think of that view. More . . .

Cass Sunstein supported the Bush Administration theory of inherent authority to spy on Americans without warrants:

Hugh Hewitt: Do you consider the quality of the media coverage here to be good, bad, or in between?

Cass Sunstein: Pretty bad, and I think the reason is we're seeing a kind of libertarian panic a little bit, where what seems at first glance...this might be proved wrong...but where what seems at first glance a pretty modest program is being described as a kind of universal wiretapping, and also being described as depending on a wild claim of presidential authority, which the president, to his credit, has not made any such wild claim. The claims are actually fairly modest, and not unconventional. So the problem with what we've seen from the media is treating this as much more peculiar, and much larger than it actually is

(Emphasis supplied.) Perhaps he is advising Obama now on FISA. Consider these thoughts from Sunstein:

Hugh Hewitt: So if we assume, and I do, that FISA is Constitutional, if it puts into place an arguably exclusive means of obtaining warrants for surveillance of al Qaeda and their agents in the United States, does the president's avoidance of that necessarily make him a law breaker? Or does it make the FISA ineffective insofar as it would attempt to restrict the president's power?

Cass Sunstein: Yeah. I guess I'd say there are a couple of possibilities. One is that we should interpret FISA conformably with the president's Constitutional authority. So if FISA is ambiguous, or its applicability is in question, the prudent thing to do, as the first President Bush liked to say, is to interpret it so that FISA doesn't compromise the president's Constitutional power. And that's very reasonable, given the fact that there's an authorization to wage war, and you cannot wage war without engaging in surveillance. If FISA is interpreted as preventing the president from doing what he did here, then the president does have an argument that the FISA so interpreted is unconstitutional. So I don't think any president would relinquish the argument that the Congress lacks the authority to prevent him from acting in a way that protects national security, by engaging in foreign surveillance under the specific circumstances of post-9/11.

(Emphasis supplied.) The question is this - to what degree do the views of Cass Sunstein on these issues reflect the views of Barack Obama? I would like to know.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on June 21, 2008 (boomark / email).