contrapositive

ROBERTS WINKS? Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) had some questions for the prospective chief justice on the Bybee memo and presidential authority more generally. Let's go to the videotape:

ROBERTS: Senator, I believe that no one is above the law under our system, and that includes the president. The president is fully bound by the law, the constitution and statutes...The framework for analyzing that is in the Youngstown Sheet and Tube case, the famous case coming out of President Truman's seizure of the steel mills.

LEAHY: The Supreme Court held that [the seizure of the mills] unconstitutional.

ROBERTS: Exactly...

LEAHY: Let me ask you this: Is Youngstown settled law? Would you consider Youngstown settled law?

ROBERTS: I think the approach in the case is one that has guided the court in this area since 1954, '52, whatever it was.

LEAHY: The reason I ask that, when Mr. Bybee wrote this memo, he never cited Youngstown...

ROBERTS: Youngstown's a very important case in a number of respects; not least the fact that the opinion that everyone looks to, the Jackson opinion, was by Justice Jackson who was, of course, FDR's attorney general and certainly a proponent of expansive executive powers...

LEAHY: You've also said he was one of the justices you admire the most.

ROBERTS: He is, for a number of reasons. And what's significant about that aspect of his career is here's someone whose job it was to promote and defend an expansive view of executive powers as attorney general, which he did very effectively. And then as he went on the court, as you can tell from his decision in Youngstown, he took an entirely different view of a lot of issues; in one famous case even disagreeing with one of his own prior opinions. He wrote a long opinion about how he can't believe he once held those views. I think it's very important...

LEAHY: Are you sending us a message?

ROBERTS: Well, I'm just saying... (LAUGHTER)