No sooner did Victor Davis Hanson compile a prodigious list of national-security flip-flops by the Obama Left (posted on the Corner under the title “If We Say It Is, It Is . . . ”) than we learned the list would have to get longer. Keeping up with this administration’s reversals is a full-time job.

The New York Times reports that President Obama is considering the issuance of an executive signing statement in conjunction with his impending assent to the defense appropriations bill. Remember when the Law Profs Division of the Obama Left told us Bush signing statements were the death knell of our constitutional system?

In fact, as Times correspondent Charlie Savage concedes (you’ll find it if you stick around through the end of his report), then–Yale Law School dean Harold Koh joined his American Bar Association colleagues during those bad old Bush days in blasting signing statements as “contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional separation of powers.” You may know Dean Koh better from his current job: top lawyer in the Obama State Department. In any event, it seems that in the age of Obama, signing statements are one of the few things that are not a crisis. Savage grudgingly recounts that Obama has actually issued several signing statements already. The reporter is quick to qualify Obama signing statements as “relatively uncontroversial challenges” to congressional authority, by which he apparently means they were not upsetting to the Times.

This one, though, will be controversial even by the Gray Lady’s forgiving standards for this president. Mr. Obama is weighing whether to announce that his sweeping powers under Article II of the Constitution nullify Congress’s prohibition against transferring terrorist detainees from Gitmo to the U.S. for civilian trials. The president also objects, we’re told, to a congressional provision that would bar transfers of detainees to other countries absent a certification from the secretary of defense that the countries in question had met what Savage describes as “a strict set of security conditions.” 

This is a truly remarkable development. The Lawyer Left went berserk over President Bush’s constitutionally rooted and historically tame assertions of executive power. Though the appeals court created by Congress to rule on surveillance matters had endorsed the principle that the president has inherent power — which Congress cannot vitiate — to conduct national-security surveillance, lefty lawyers screamed that the Bush NSA’s warrantless surveillance program was illegal, an inexcusable violation of Congress’s FISA statute. Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers and several other House Democrats even suggested that Bush be impeached over it.

Lawyers including Eric Holder filed briefs on behalf of al-Qaeda terrorist Jose Padilla, objecting to Bush’s assertion of commander-in-chief authority to detain Padilla, a U.S. citizen, as an enemy combatant rather than give him a full civilian trial. (We haven’t heard much from now–Attorney General Holder on why it’s nevertheless constitutionally kosher for commanders in chief to assassinate an American citizen, as Obama has apparently authorized with respect to Anwar al-Awlaki.) Georgetown Law School professor Neal Katyal — now Obama’s acting solicitor general — convinced a sharply divided Supreme Court that the commander-in-chief could not order military-commission trials for terrorist war criminals because such presidentially authorized commissions purportedly violated a congressional statute (the Uniform Code of Military Justice), notwithstanding that presidents and military commanders had been using commission trials since the Revolutionary War.

Vice President Dick Cheney and his staff were the targets of ceaseless scorn for what was breathlessly claimed to be a Cheney agenda to restore presidential power to the zenith it had reached before Watergate. Books were written lamenting the Bush administration’s purported aversion to working with Congress. (Little, though, was said about Democratic leaders in Congress being briefed in real time about the CIA’s interrogation program, the detention camp at Gitmo, and the NSA program.)