Who needs courts?

I'm the President.

I want to break a law.

I appoint people who like me to the Office of Legal Counsel who will rubber stamp the law I want to break.

Then a later Attorney General, whose job is to uphold the law, says that he can't prosecute the violation of the law because the President received a legal opinion that it was ok.

So now, the legal opinion of the Office of Legal Counsel is as good as a get out of jail free card.

These are instructions for future presidents on how to break the law with impunity. Who needs courts to decide if a law has been broken? Who needs prosecutors? All we need are party hacks to tell us it's ok, and that's the end of it.

More here, and here. My point made another way:

David Kurtz's "Mark This Day" blurb misses the most important point -- it's not just that the Attorney General's position is that a DOJ Order makes the subject activity legal but that, as Nadler brought out, there is now no recourse to a judicial test, either criminal (through refusal to prosecute) or civil (through the state secrets privilege based solely on a DOJ affidavit). The DOJ is entitled to take whatever position it wants, however self-serving and unitary, but now there is no avenue for judicial review and so that is the end of the story. That is the important point here.

If Mukasey isn't impeached immediately, there is no rule of law in the United States executive branch. It's that simple.