Reuters is reporting that Manuel Zelaya, the ousted president of Honduras, has managed to return to the country and is now holed up in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa to avoid arrest.

As Jennifer pointed out this morning, Mary Anastasia O’Grady has a must-read column in today’s Wall Street Journal, arguing that the Obama administration’s furious opposition to Zelaya’s perfectly constitutional removal from office is beginning to seem not only unfounded but bizarre.

The Congressional Research Service, an arm of the Library of Congress, issued a report recently that the Honduran government did nothing illegal under Honduran law. “Available sources indicate that the judicial and legislative branches applied constitutional and statutory law in the case against President Zelaya in a manner that was judged by the Honduran authorities from both branches of the government to be in accordance with the Honduran legal system,” wrote Norma Gutierrez, a senior foreign-law specialist at the CRS. “The Supreme Court of Honduras has constitutional and statutory authority to hear cases against the President of the Republic and many other high officers of the State, to adjudicate and enforce judgments, and to request the assistance of the public forces to enforce its rulings.”

It seems that the definition of coup d’état at Foggy Bottom and the White House is not just an “extra-constitutional change of government” but also a constitutional one—if the Obama administration doesn’t approve of it.

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 21st, 2009 at 5:34 PM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.