First Judge Colleen McMahon
uses the two literary classics to describe her ruling that the Constitution doesn't allow the President to assassinate American citizens but that the Administration does not have to release internal memoranda that justify ordering assassinations:
“I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that
effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as
perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible
with our Constitution and laws while keeping the reasons for their
conclusion a secret,” she wrote.
“The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on
me,” Judge McMahon wrote, adding that she was operating in a legal
environment that amounted to “a veritable Catch-22.”
Conor Friedersdorf
begins his analysis of McMahon's ruling with two more literary references:
Permitted to run CNN for a day, I'd amuse myself by arranging for a Crossfire-style
debate between English professors who disagree intensely about how best
to characterize President Obama's national security policies. "They're
Orwellian," one would insist. "They're actually better described as
Kafkaesque," the other would counter. They'd go back and forth, citing
his transgressions against basic norms of justice and comparing them to
plot points from dystopian novels. Poor Wolf Blitzer. He'd be horrified
by a segment that afforded so little deference to a sitting president.
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