Sovereign immunity has been a critical and criticized concept in common law. It has been a cornerstone of institutional and corporate (in a rather pure if problematic sense) autonomy. This is an imporant concept in a nation state. The Stencil/Feres doctrine holds that the sovereign can only be sued with permission of the sovereign and prevents people from suing the government in case of war casualties and death.

So one issue is the nature of Obama's extension of the doctrine. It's not who the extension applies to, because it always has applied to all of us. The extension is to what triggers the causality from which the sovereign is immune. The extension is related to the right violated. But here's an additional complication, the right that is ostensibly violated is NOT a federally recognized Constituutional right, it's privacy. (And what about the idea that this is yet *another* nod to the idea that an unennumetated right to privacy is implied by a penumbra of of rights and case law?)

This is interesting and I need to look at the the case Jonathan Turley mentioned to see what the hell he was talking about with Olbermann.

But here's another thought. Let's look at this in the context of the Agent Orange settlement case. What about the possibilty of the sovereign throwing the peeps a bone? What about the intitutional autonomy power grab of extending mercy in the form of legal remediation? (cite Douglas Hay).

The power move here is to claim sovereign immunity while getting behind the Leahy truth commission, making the argument that if we don't do this, Spain and other UN countries are more likely to charge members of the previous administration with war crimes.

Now, yes this is a Machievellian argument, but it really goes to the power and limits of an elected sovereign in a system of popular sovereignty. Here's the rather logically simple, yet socially complicated, meta-message to the serially elected sovereigns, "Don't fuck this up for us all, and if you do, we'll have to come down on you. It's not personal or politically partisan, rather, it's institutional. We don't want to come down on you like a ton of fucking bricks, but we have to - it's just business."

Clearly I have to work on this post. But shouldn't I get pathos/nerd points if only for typing this out on my iPhone while watching teevee?