GAFFNEY: The questionable Mr. Koh. A transnationalist cannot 'uphold' the Constitution

The Washington Times ^ | April 28, 2009 | Frank J. Gaffney Jr.

[Scanian]

This afternoon, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will have an opportunity to demonstrate why the Framers gave the Senate the constitutional power to confirm presidential appointees.

If they fail to exercise that power vigorously with respect to the nomination of Harold Koh to be the top State Department lawyer, they will not only have been derelict. They will be accomplices to an assault on our Constitution that ultimately will result in an unprecedented, and likely permanent, derogation of the Senate's vital role and responsibilities.

After all, Mr. Koh is one of the nation's most prominent - and aggressive - proponents of a set of hoary notions that, for shorthand, can be described as "universal jurisprudence." Reduced to its essence, Mr. Koh's school of transnationalism thinks the Constitution of the United States and the laws that flow from it must be "improved" continuously in extraconstitutional ways.

To be sure, transnationalists profess to find support for their desire to morph our statutes and rulings so as to conform them to the international "norms" and judicial rulings with which they are at odds by citing the very Founders whose handiwork and clear purpose they treat with such contempt.

On the grounds that the Declaration of Independence exhibited a "decent respect to the opinions of mankind," they contend we are obliged to do so today as well. This requires, in Mr. Koh's words, that we "internalize" into our domestic legal code and policies whatever dictates should, in the opinion of others, govern.

In this way, Mr. Koh and his fellow transnationalists - who evidently include one-time University of Chicago professor of constitutional law Barack Obama - seek to amend our Constitution and statutes.

[Cindy]

Additional Reading regarding Mr. Koh:

http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/koh/index

[Diogenesis]

[Adder]

You mean we can adopt Taliban legal codes and have idiots like Mr. Koh executed in soccer stadiums?

Wow....how neat.

[libertylover]

Obama has stated openly that he thinks the United States needs “fundamental change”. I've tried to tell people that to “fundamentally change” something means you have to change the foundation. To change the foundation of the U.S. means you have to change the founding documents or simply ignore the words written in them and make up your own meaning to what you want. Obama and other liberals have always chosen the latter method and here we go again.

Sigh, sometimes I hate it when I'm right all the time.

[seatrout]

So, a globalist criticizes a transnationalist. Cute, but doesn’t that pot/kettle thing come into play here?

[kellynla]

four years from now, all we can do is hope & pray that we still have a country to vote Hussein out of office...

[La Lydia]

I'm thinking Manchurian candidate-nominee. Here's what Wiki says about him:

According to Koh, his parents ... grew up under Japanese colonial rule, forbidden to speak Korean or even to use their Korean names. When their country was divided after World War II, my mother and her family were trapped in North Korea. In desperation, they hiked for days to the border to be picked up and were brought back to Seoul. But even there, they lived under dictatorship. For less than a year in the 1960s, Korea enjoyed democracy. My father joined the diplomatic corps. But one day, tanks rolled and a coup d'etat toppled the government, leaving us to grow up in America.

After the coup, Koh's father, legal scholar and diplomat Kwang Lim Koh, was granted asylum in the United States. He moved to New Haven, Connecticut with his family and took a teaching position at Yale. His wife, Hesung Chun Koh (Harold Koh's mother), had a Ph.D. in sociology and taught at Yale as well—they were the first Asian-Americans to teach there.

He obviously has some axes to grind that have NOTHING TO DO with upholding the Constitution of the United States. I hope one of the RINOs in the Senate has the common sense and patriotism to grill him on his opinions. This is little short of treason. It is little consolation to know he would be one of the first to be rounded up and beheaded under our Overlord's overlords. We should not be putting people whose allegiance is to another country or to unconstitutional systems in such powerful positions.

[La Lydia]

"... transnationalists profess to find support for their desire to morph our statutes and rulings so as to conform them to the international "norms" and judicial rulings with which they are at odds by citing the very Founders whose handiwork and clear purpose they treat with such contempt....This requires, in Mr. Koh's words, that we "internalize" into our domestic legal code and policies whatever dictates should, in the opinion of others, govern.

"In this way, Mr. Koh and his fellow transnationalists - who evidently include one-time University of Chicago professor of constitutional law Barack Obama - seek to amend our Constitution and statutes. They would do so through means that afford none of the representative government, checks and balances...In this way, they can promulgate laws and judicial rulings that simply would never pass muster with the American people or a majority of their elected representatives."

[La Lydia]

I find it interesting that Specter time his announcement in a way that has smothered all coverage of Koh’s Senate hearing today.