Haven't researched the issue myself, but this looks fairly detailed.  

http://joshblackman.com/blog/2015/02/17/can-a-district-court-issue-a-nat...

And the American people at large. Theatrics, to be sure. And like Moe said somewhere else, nothing wrong with that.

It is the job of a good CEO to be theatrical, especially if he's the new guy. You gotta come in, and show you mean business. Trump knows this. He's spent a lifetime preparing for this role.

Obama took the very 'high road' approach to governance.  He didn't go in for theatrics like Trump is--that's not a glitch in the system, it's a feature.

Trump, and a huge chunk of his voters, disapproved of the 'high road' approach to foreign policy--or, possibly, policy of any stripe.  Staying 'above the fray' and not grandstanding were *definitely key features* of the Obama presidency.  But the people who elected Trump clearly didn't approve of Obama's policies and/or process enough to elect a successor who served at the highest level of his administration and moved lock-step with him on many of the issues Trump ran on as a dissident to the status quo.

So when you boggle to the tune of 'couldn't this have been done without the grandstanding?' you *seem* to be missing that the grandstanding--which is NOT all-style-and-no-substance, contrary to quasi-popular opinion--is a key feature of a Trump presidency, and it's one his supporters *wanted* him to employ.  They didn't show up, 20-30 thousand a pop to fill stadiums, asking him to be bombastic and theatrical on the road but then to Tone It Down once he made it into the Oval.  This is precisely what they wanted--and they want it precisely because it's a departure from the Old Way under Obama.

As to your Geneva Convention query, that's one that has serious traction--and should *NOT* be grounds for dismissal of the point President Trump raised in the EO, but rather it should cause each of us to reflect on *why* the Geneva Convention was a thing in the first place, and why the Civilized Nations of the world agreed to abide by it.

Are there something fundamentally different factors pertaining to the clash with Islamo-fascism/Radical Islamic Terrorism that *might* invalidate some of the fundamental values upon which the Geneva Convention's signatories' societies were built?  If so, what might they be?

It's a messy, messy subject.  But if we're not read to roll up our sleeves and ask, honestly and without rancor, "Should Universal Human Rights apply here?" then we've got no business commenting on the subject.  And that sucks--that REALLY sucks--for everyone involved, but that's the world we presently live in.  I would hope that we could arrive at a calm, rational and empirically-valid position which would indeed support Universal Human Rights and mechanisms, like the Geneva Convention, that seek to preserve and promulgate them for everyone.  But if we're not willing to at least *consider* the matter, in a fresh and unbiased fashion, we might be missing the forest for the trees.

Well, he is on record many times supporting torture. Waterboarding is against the Geneva convention and he wants "much, much worse". Mattis is too principled to do it but Pompeo certainly isn't.  

I really hope Trump's supporters don't fall down the same "he can do no evil" rabbit hole that Obama's supporters fell down but that's pretty much exactly what I see happening. It's very baffling to me how Christians could so enthusiastically endorese torturing other human beings. Sad. 

And now we are too!

This reminds me of early on in the election cycle, when the media would purportedly comment on Trump's comments and/or lack of policies.

My sister (who I don't think was a Trump fan AT ALL to begin the election cycle) talks about wanting to get a good mad worked up over Trump's 'comments' as the media reported them.  So she'd dig up the transcripts of his speeches and look through them for the offending quotes.  She concluded they were all taken grossly out of context, which only spurred her to check out DJT's campaign website--where his policy papers had been printed since the beginning of his campaign.

Has DJT, by breaking the media's stranglehold, scored a YUGE victory for critical thinking and investigative tools?  How many people actually read EO's before him?

Tectonic shifts are presently underway beneath our flip-flops...

I sincerely appreciate the the work you did to put this together.  I learned something.

However...

you just couldn't help yourself, could you?  "Liberal attorneys", huh?

Couldn't possibly be very conservative attorneys simply following the orders of their commander in chief, right?  Because any non-liberal attorney would simply take it on himself to disobey a liberal president, which clearly must be the right thing to do?

I don't know where this stuff comes from...

I think many on the right start out assuming that the vast majority of military servicemen are honorable, hard-working, decent, and skillful men and women who uphold a rigid moral standard and genuinely want to promote peace and save lives, including the lives of civilians trapped under hostile foreign rulers. I think many on the left assume that the military is mostly populated by hot-headed, uber-macho, reckless, power-crazed killers - that such men and women may be necessary for our defense, but it is an ugly necessity that must be heavily restrained.

Both sides oversimplify, but, as the son of a Navy submariner and the friend to many in all branches of the armed forces, the first interpretation is closer from my view.  Some here will object to my characterization of the left, but you need only look to the popular culture to see what the left thinks of our military as a general movement, regardless of what some of its individuals may now assert. Or, you can look at the campaign rhetoric of Democrats running for office during the second half of the Bush administration and the first half of Obama's presidency.

If any here have not heard of the prisoner's dilemma, a quick summary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma

Or, watch an episode of the game show "Friend or Foe"

The idea is that it is advantageous to cooperate as often as possible rather than betraying a rival, but that people will often choose not to do so.

This same paradox has been applied to the art of politics and the art of war. Computer simulations have even been run using historical data to assess the best strategy to ensure the most cooperation between rival nations or political parties.

What they find when they do those sorts of studies is that, in a repeating simulation (repeat the dilemma over and over, as happens in real life politics and war), if you enter the game betraying your rival too often, they will also betray you too often (result = bad for everyone), if you refuse to betray your rival even after they have betrayed you, they will betray you more.  Result = really bad for you, great for your rival. If you enter the game by attempting to cooperate, and continue cooperating so long as they do, but respond exactly in proportion and in kind if and when they betray you, the result will be a gradual but certain move toward the cooperative outcome (your rival learns that they can't gain advantage by betraying you and, in his own self-interest, they will start cooperating).

In politics, that means that rival political parties should respond to a betrayal of their agreed-upon rules by the rival by responding exactly proportionally.

Harry Reid betrayed the Senate by changing one of its' most important protections for the minority party by simple majority vote and, thus, ending the filibuster for judicial and administrative appointments (other than SCOTUS) with no say at all on such an important matter by the minority GOP. That benefited the democrats at the time, but the game repeats.  Now the GOP has the majority. It would be a bad result for the GOP to change the rule back immediately (because then the democrats would simply do the same thing, or perhaps get even bolder the next time they're in power, resulting in less stability in the Senate), and it would be a bad result for the GOP to go further than the democrats did by, for example, nuking the filibuster for SCOTUS judges on a simple majority vote, because then the democrats will do something even worse...for example nuking the filibuster for legislation or somesuch, resulting in majoritarian tyranny and potentially civil war. The only correct play is to, as Mitch McConnell now says he will do, respond exactly in kind. They changed the rules and they need to learn that their actions have consequences and that their rules change is now considered permanent.  They are about to get absolutely CRUSHED at the administrative and judicial level as a narrow GOP majority rams through countless judges and cabinet officials and administrators that they find abhorrent.  Hopefully, they will learn an important lesson from this...don't change the rules to advantage the majority further because you will pay the same price the next time they have control.

By the same token, when you are facing an enemy like ISIS that essentially hits the betray button every time the game starts, the mathematically correct answer to to betray them precisely in kind, because doing anything else means losing the game every time and paying a higher price for the conflict.

Their aim is to destroy western democracy and decency. Our aim must be to utterly obliterate them.