President Obama doesn’t respect American values—he made that clear when he apologized for the “arrogance” of the Bush years in France last week, former US senator Rick Santorum writes for the Philadelphia Inquirer. But the president has outdone himself by nominating Harold Koh to be the top lawyer at the State Department, a move that confirms Obama's "disdain for American values."
Koh, the dean of Yale Law School, is a transnationalist—academic-speak for a person who thinks other nations’ laws should influence our own. "What Holland or Belgium or Kenya or any other nation or coalition of nations thinks has no bearing on our exercise of executive, legislative, or judicial power," Santorum writes, but "old fogies like me believe we ought to pay more attention to the opinions of the Founders who wrote the Constitution and the people who have lived under it." (More Harold Koh stories.)