There’s an old maxim in Washington that when politicians are either unable or unwilling to tackle a problem directly, they appoint a commission to give the issue more intensive study. So it was lastweek when President Obama created the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, a bipartisan group of 18 souls charged with solving perhaps the country’s most vexing and pressing public-policy problem—red ink. Read the rest of this entry »

John Yoo’s book Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power is getting good reviews from historians. But Yoo is perhaps more accustomed to criticism, given that he coauthored some of the controversial Bush administration memos regarding the use of torture to interrogate suspected terrorists when he served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2003. Yoo, currently a professor at the University of California-Berkeley law school, spoke with U.S. News about the history of presidential power, the “supersized executive,” and how the government should handle suspected terrorists. Excerpts: Read the rest of this entry »