Con­science com­pels me to add that in focus­ing so directly on the coup I don’t mean to imply that Mel Zelaya, the ousted pres­i­dent, is some kind of exiled saint. As Kevin Casas-​Zamora of the Brook­ings Insti­tu­tion notes, he had his own dif­fi­cul­ties respect­ing the spirit and the letter of the Hon­duran constitution:

As other Latin Amer­i­can lead­ers, Pres­i­dent Zelaya fell victim to the virus of pres­i­den­tial reelection….The real prob­lem, how­ever, was that by orga­niz­ing a de facto ref­er­en­dum to test the pop­u­lar­ity of his idea, Zelaya pur­sued his ambi­tion with total dis­re­gard of his country’s con­sti­tu­tion. The latter explic­itly for­bids hold­ing referenda—let alone an unsanc­tioned “pop­u­lar consultation”—to amend the con­sti­tu­tion and, more specif­i­cally, to modify the pres­i­den­tial term. Unsur­pris­ingly, the president’s idea met with the resis­tance of Con­gress, nearly all par­ties (includ­ing his own), the press, busi­ness, elec­toral author­i­ties, and, cru­cially, the Supreme Court, that deemed the whole endeavor illegal.

But the idea that one ille­gal act doesn’t excuse another is one of the pil­lars of the rule of law. Though the unpros­e­cuted skele­tons in our own closet sug­gest that the US doesn’t have the same moral stand­ing on this ques­tion as before, it’s nice to see Obama deal­ing with the Hon­duras sit­u­a­tion in unam­bigu­ous terms.

(AP Photo)