Sorry Mr. President, we don't think that would be legal.

More heartwarming news for defenders of liberty:

President Barack Obama is staffing his Justice Department with some of his predecessor's fiercest critics, and lawyers who have spent years defining the limits of executive power will now be helping to wield it.

The change may be most dramatic at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — which defended some of Bush’s most controversial policies — where a small cadre of lawyers who had an outsized influence on legal criticism of Bush are taking the top three jobs.

Those three — Dawn Johnsen, Martin Lederman, and David Barron — and others made the case that Bush’s interrogation policy was justified by flawed legal reasoning. Their arguments precipitated one of Obama’s most dramatic early acts: flatly repudiating all government legal advice on interrogation issued between September 11, 2001, and January 20, 2009.

“I think they will be an irritant for Obama in the best possible way — they’re very honest lawyers,” said Rosa Brooks, a professor at Georgetown University Law School, where Lederman also taught. “When Dawn and Marty and David think that he is asking if he can do something that in their view pushes the envelope and goes beyond the bounds of what is legal, they’re going to say, ‘Sorry Mr. Obama, we think that would be illegal.’”

They step into positions ripe for conflict, and have staked out clear positions that could possibly restrain Obama’s ability to, among other things, conduct military operations against the wishes of Congress.

“They have alarmingly narrow views of executive power,” said a former Bush aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Yippee ki-yay, mofos.