Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina loves the law. Nuts about it. We know this because he tells us this many, many times at this morning’s Senate subcommittee hearing on “What Went Wrong: Torture and the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush Administration.” We know he loves the law because he says “[t]he fact that we embrace the rule of law is a strength” and that “the onlyway is to operate within the law,” and he says these things mere seconds after he explains that in the desperate days after 9/11, when the lawyers were crafting legal arguments to legalize conduct that was illegal, they did so because “they saw law as a nicety we couldn’t afford.”
So the real question for the committee, the one we never get to, is how much rule of law can we afford, and what happens to the rule of law when you’re getting it for 10 cents on the dollar? Keep Reading.
