Another excellent pick for the Office of Legal Counsel

Politico reports that Obama is going to nominate David Barron of Harvard Law School to be the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel. He will be the chief deputy for Dawn Johnsen, tabbed to head the OLC. Ben Smith says that the pick “suggests that the legal advisory office’s leaders are going to see their job as, in part, standing up to the president if they think he’s going too far.” I agree.

Barron is the co-author, along with Marty Lederman, of an important law review article last year that challenged the Bush administration’s positions on executive authority on a number of key issues, including the keeping of detainees indefinitely and the ability to wage war without Congressional approval.

I was rooting for Lederman to get this job, but Barron works just fine too. All of this sends a strong signal that Obama is prepared to give up the bloated executive authority that Bush claimed for himself and that he is willing to appoint legal advisers who will hold his feet to the fire on those issues and draw clear constitutional limits on his authority.