President Nixon ordered Archibald Cox fired from the job of “special prosecutor” on Oct. 20, 1973. Rather than follow the order, first Attorney General Elliot Richardson and then Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus quit. Richardson and Ruckelshaus had both told members of Congress that they wouldn’t interfere with Cox’s investigation, so they turned in their keys and in a stroke established a very high bar for government lawyers confronting their superiors on matters of principle.
It isn’t clear yet what Caroline Krauss, the acting assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice, and Jeh Johnson, the general counsel of the Department of Defense, told President Obama about the War Powers Act and the president’s Libyan adventure, but if the New York Times is correct, they both advised the president that “they believed that the United States military’s activities in the NATO-led air war amounted to ‘hostilities’ ” as defined by the War Powers Act.
