I was just watching an episode of the PBS program American Experience, about the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal after World War II. During his cross examination of Hermann Goering, Robert H. Jackson, the chief counsel for the United States and a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, asked the following question:

You did prohibit all court review, and considered it necessary to prohibit court review of the causes for taking people into what you call protective custody. That is right, isn’t it?

Goering answered, in a roundabout way, that Jackson was correct.

You know, this situation reminds me of something more recent. Gitmo, perhaps? Or was it Tom Delay, bemoaning the existence of judicial review in the Washington Times?

I blame Congress over the last 50 to 100 years for not standing up and taking its responsibility given to it by the Constitution. The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that’s nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress didn’t stop them. The reason we had judicial review is because Congress didn’t stop them. The reason we had a right to privacy is because Congress didn’t stop them.

Or perhaps it reminds me of the Bush Administration’s determination to skip constitutionally-mandated warrants for their domestic wiretaps. There are just so many things to choose from, when looking for examples of official unwillingness to be constrained by law.

This little exchange from the Nuremberg transcript sends a shiver down my spine, for some reason:

MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: Was it also necessary, in operating this system, that you must not have persons entitled to public trials in independent courts? And you immediately issued an order that your political police would not be subject to court review or to court orders, did you not?

GOERING: You must differentiate between the two categories; those who had committed some act of treason against the new state or those who might be proved to have committed such an act, were naturally turned over to the courts. The others, however, of whom one might expect such acts, but who had not yet committed them, were taken into protective custody, and these were the people who were taken to concentration camps.

Brrrrrrrrrrr!!!

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on the grim state of the union:

So President Bush’s plan to reduce imports of Middle East oil turns out to be no more substantial than his plan — floated two years ago, then flushed down the memory hole — to send humans to Mars.

…

Here’s the story on oil: In the State of the Union address Mr. Bush suggested that “cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol” and other technologies would allow us “to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East.”

But the next day, officials explained that he didn’t really mean what he said. “This was purely an example,” said Samuel Bodman, the energy secretary. And the administration has actually been scaling back the very research that Mr. Bush hyped Tuesday night: the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is about to lay off staff because of budget cuts. …

…

What about the rest of the speech? The State of the Union is normally an occasion for boasting about an administration’s achievements. But what’s a speechwriter to do when there are no achievements?

One answer is to pretend that the bad stuff never happened. The Medicare drug benefit is Mr. Bush’s largest domestic initiative to date. It’s also a disaster: at enormous cost, the administration has managed to make millions of elderly Americans worse off. So drugs went unmentioned in the State of the Union.

Another answer is to rely on evasive language. In Iraq, said Mr. Bush, we’ve “changed our approach to reconstruction.”

In fact, reconstruction has failed. Almost three years after the war began, oil production is well below prewar levels, Baghdad is getting only an average of 3.2 hours of electricity a day, and more than 60 percent of water and sanitation projects have been canceled.

…

There’s a common theme underlying the botched reconstruction of Iraq, the botched response to Katrina (which Mr. Bush never mentioned), the botched drug program, and the nonexistent energy program. John DiIulio, the former White House head of faith-based policy, explained it more than three years ago. He told the reporter Ron Suskind how this administration operates: “There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. … I heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions. There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues.”

In other words, this administration is all politics and no policy. It knows how to attain power, but has no idea how to govern. That’s why the administration was caught unaware when Katrina hit, and why it was totally unprepared for the predictable problems with its drug plan. It’s why Mr. Bush announced an energy plan with no substance behind it. And it’s why the state of the union — the thing itself, not the speech — is so grim.