Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Eric Holder is a decent man.
Al-Qaida is a cult of martyrdom.
I defend non-criminal detention.
I've got no problem with drone strikes.
I generally favor permissive abortion laws.
I normally try to ignore presidential tweets.
It is possible for great nations to rot from within.
There's all kinds of crazy right-wing conspiracies about me.
I'm positively enthusiastic about American surveillance policies.
The difference between a cult and a religion, of course, lies in extremity.
Liberals have been overselling the threat to reproductive rights for decades.
You know, you don't get to survive that long without making some compromises.
I'm a rationalist and a skeptic, someone who safely separates faith from reason.
The only way to tyrantproof the presidency is not to elect tyrants to the presidency.
Drosnin's 'The Bible Code' would hardly be worth mentioning were it not such a smash hit.
You cannot denude the presidency of the substance and power of its office. It can't be done.
National security is not just things that go boom. It is not just terrorists and foreign adversaries.
I was much less offended than others were by the CIA's interrogations in the years after September 11.
Good intelligence analysis, after all, is all about discrimination between what's important and what's not.
I'm an unabashed apologist for strong national-security authority. That's why I might be more alarmed by Trump.
Recommended additon to the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights: "A right to not have your data rise up and attack you."
Secret courts require great faith that the Justice Department - and future Justice Departments - will act with integrity.
In 1999 and 2000, when I was a young editorial writer at the 'Post', the 'Post' won the public service medal two years running.
Stability in law - particularly constitutional law - is critically important; the Supreme Court would do well to remember that.
In general, liberals fear conservative judges far too much. In almost all areas, in fact, they dramatically overstate the stakes.
We should stop thinking of Snowden, to the extent that we ever were, as a hero. We should stop thinking of him as a whistleblower.
June 10, 2002, the day John Ashcroft announced the arrest of Jose Padilla, marked a low point in Ashcroft's career as Attorney General.
The concept of war is not the construct that will govern - psychologically, politically, and legally - our continuing response to Al Qaeda.
As a general matter, if the president wants to withdraw from a treaty, he simply gets to do that. And that's part of the powers of the office.
The nature of constitutional delegations of power is that they entitle the empowered official to do certain things that other people can't do.
When it comes to letting kids out into dark alleys, we understand that they have things to steal. We need to understand that in online life, too.
I have fiercely criticized both the Bush administration's counterterrorism policies and the Obama administration's - and fiercely defended both as well.
Government lawyers, like private ones, face the problem routinely of aiding in the defense and development of positions in whose correctness they don't believe.
If the 'enemy combatant' cases of Padilla and Hamdi present a clash between liberty and security, each side champions one while giving short shrift to the other.
When somebody promises to do something, you have to think about whether that's something that you would be willing to see happen because the powers are simply too vast.
It's hardly a news flash that a secret, clandestine intelligence agency might resist giving out information about its operations when not not legally required to do so.
One effect of Roe was to mobilize a permanent constituency for criminalizing abortion - a constituency that has driven much of the southern realignment toward conservatism.
The search for the Torah codes is rooted in the unfathomable theological premise that the Torah - itself a set of five books of limited length - contains literally all truth.
Comey really spent an enormous amount of energy in the period in which both he and Trump were in office trying to protect the FBI from political interference from the White House.
It might seem perverse for honestly religious people to group their faiths with those of the sadists and megalomaniacs who run most cults, but a growing number are doing just that.
If you believe, as I do, that the scope and range of presidential authority is great, that puts a lot of weight on the civic virtue and decency of the individual who holds the office.
The notion of law enforcement as professional, not political, began developing as an aspiration and an ethos even while, in practice, the FBI was the personal fiefdom of J. Edgar Hoover.
Reasonable people can disagree about the authorities the NSA should have, when it's appropriate for the CIA to use drone strikes, and how assertive U.S. foreign policy and intelligence should be.
How exactly the obstruction-of-justice statutes interact with the president's broad powers to supervise the executive branch under Article II of the Constitution is a genuinely difficult question.
There is nothing normal about removing the FBI director, as a general matter. It's an extraordinary measure. This is an office that is typically served for a term of years, 10 years, to be precise.
A generation of women has grown up thinking of reproductive freedom as a constitutional right, and the Court should not casually take away rights that it has determined the Constitution guarantees.
Asking journalists to denounce leaks because of their deleterious effects on the functioning of government is as hopeless as asking an airline to denounce jet fuel because of its impact on the environment.
I understand that a lot of people who use phrases like #resistance have found my work valuable. But my job is to look at difficult problems of national security in ways that may be useful to policymakers and the public.
There is no doubt in my mind that Article II limits to a considerable degree the application of the obstruction statutes to the president when he is acting in his capacity as chief law-enforcement officer of the country.
Full disclosure: James Comey is a friend. I won't pretend to neutrality about him. He is a highly honorable and decent person, and I have no doubt that he made the many judgments for which people loathe him in good faith.