RUTHFULLY YOURS

“These are the hardest of the hard core,” Senator John McCain, a former Vietnam POW, told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. “These are the highest high-risk people, and others that we have released have gone back into the fight.”

Susan Rice, Obama’s national-security adviser, appeared on the Sunday-morning talk shows in full-spin mode that was reminiscent of her Benghazi appearances. “This was an urgent and acute situation,” she insisted, citing Bergdahl’s health as a reason for evading the legal requirement. Other Obama officials claim that the law wasn’t violated because U.S. diplomats went through a third party — Qatar — in arranging the release. George Stephanopoulos of ABC News summarized the administration’s justifications as follows:

This was moving so fast, they couldn’t talk to the Congress. But they also say the president, when he signed this law, said he had the constitutional authority not to live by it, that he had the constitutional authority to go around Congress and simply do what he needed to do to get the detainees back to their home countries.

The humanitarian aspects of Bergdahl’s release aren’t in dispute. Everyone is very glad he is back home. But there is real question as to whether he is a hero or a deserter. Significantly, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel pointedly declines to say whether he believes that Bergdahl was attempting to desert the Army or go AWOL when he suddenly left his unit in Afghanistan in 2009 and disappeared. E-mails he sent prior to his capture surfaced in 2012 in Rolling Stone and indicated that he had been considering desertion.

But Hagel says those facts are immaterial to the decision to engage in the controversial prisoner swap. “Our first priority is assuring his well-being and his health and getting him reunited with his family,” he told reporters. “Other circumstances that may develop and questions — those will be dealt with later.”

What also will have to be dealt with later is that the Obama White House says the exchange was part of what one official calls “a broader reconciliation framework” between the U.S. and the Taliban, who harbored the terrorists of 9/11 back in 2001. But even some White House officials privately admit there is a risk of emboldening other terrorists to kidnap U.S. troops or citizens in an effort to spring other prisoners. Still, they also claim that the prisoner swap will pay foreign-policy dividends.

We’ve heard such rationalizations before. In the 1980s, the deep personal anguish President Ronald Reagan felt over Americans taken hostage in Lebanon was the spark for what became the Iran-Contra scandal, which descended into a sordid, illegal arms-for-hostages deal. Reagan later admitted to a national TV audience that he had made a serious error in letting his heart override his head. Other misguided Middle East peace initiatives include the first Bush administration’s 1991 Madrid peace conference, which resulted in closer ties between Iran and Palestinian terrorists, ties that persist to this day.

But the Democrats who crucified Reagan for his efforts to free the hostages — and let’s recall that the hostage crisis was considered by all as urgent and acute at the time — have been cheerleaders for Obama’s prisoner swap. Democrats in Congress seem to think that the law requiring congressional consultation for prisoner swaps, a law many of them voted for just a year ago, is a mere encumbrance, and that violating it was not only justified but admirable in the circumstances.

The Obama administration’s consistently cavalier attitude toward the rule of law — whether regarding the IRS scandal, Fast and Furious, Obamacare, immigration, or the repeated refusal to answer congressional subpoenas — is profoundly disturbing.

In his 1966 poem “The Incredible Bread Machine,” R. W. Grant described an entrepreneur named Tom Smith who ran afoul of a power-seeking Justice Department. When Smith appears before the judge, he asks plaintively why he has been singled out. The judge looks down on him and intones:

The rule of law, in complex times,
Has proved itself deficient.
We much prefer the rule of men!
It’s vastly more efficient.

In its prisoner swap, the Obama administration has yet again veered away from its responsibility to uphold the former and given way to the latter.

The growing evidence that the Obama administration can’t be trusted to respect the rule of law is one of the biggest obstacles it faces in securing the support and confidence not only of Congress but of the American people.

— John Fund is national-affairs columnist for National Review Online.