I wonder if there’s a darker reason why the Dems caved so quickly on this matter of deploying troops domestically. My thoughts on their motivations: let the Republicans take the heat for actually doing it; it will be a tool there waiting for the Dems when they take the White House – or even if they don’t. Because sooner or later enough citizens are going to wake up or something is going to get sooo bad that it will be impossible for the Beltway ‘elites’ to dodge their responsibility for it. And when that happens, then troops will be needed to handle the demonstrators, the marchers, and all the little people who will be enraged at how they have been bamboozled and treacherously sold out over the course of decades. It will be a repeat of the labor unrest of the 1880s and 1890s and the Bonus Army battle of the ‘30s and the Chicago Convention police riot of ’68, with a ‘1984’ tinge just a couple of decades late. I almost want to see Senator Leahy run for President, but it seems that We desperately need him where he is now, trying to hold back this monstrous shadow. Senator Kennedy’s vote for the thing stuns: but maybe it reveals the dark side of Identity-based ‘liberalism’: troops can also be deployed ‘sensitively’ to address the concerns and anxieties of this or that ‘identity’, much the way Eisenhower sent the Army to Little Rock 51 years ago; we’re all 1950s‘southerners’ now. The National Nanny State will prove as dangerous to liberty and Constitutional ethos as the National Security State. All very un-American. But it has happened here now, and it has come wrapped in the American flag. As somebody predicted 70 years ago. The only difference is the tone of it: a chimpish bray or a sensitive whine. But that difference is irrelevant; the American way will be gone. Preventing this is the present generation of citizens’ “rendezvous with destiny”.

I've just finished Walter Karp's 1988 book of essays, one for each year of the Carter and Reagan presidencies - entitled "Liberty Under Siege". He describes Tip O'Neill, then Speaker of a Democratic House, offering PACs to the initially reluctant corporations, promising them as a return on their investment that they would get favorable treatment on Capitol Hill. By the time Reagan came along, the racket had ensnared so many Dems on the Hill that rather than risk losing it, O'Neill declared 'bipartisanship', effectively relinquishing Congressional push-back to the Presidency or oversight of the Executive or the bureaucracy or the 'business' sector. It stuns.The Post on my site is entitled "Karping".

You raise a very interesting and still-developing subject with your encomium to the military lawyers. We cannot forget that Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are not perversions of the military justice system but reckless extensions of it by the Bush administration, endangering the whole racket. And racket it certainly can be said to be: the military legal system is merely a component of the command system, hierarchical and 'win'-focused, and nobody familar with the dynamics and requirements of either the military organization or of Western law can fail to see the fundamental incompatibility there.The 'militarization' of civilian law in the past decades is precisely along the lines of the military justice 'excuse': there is a 'special circumstance', an 'emergency', such that 'the usual rules of law' don't apply.But now, as you point out, something new to the system is taking place: it has been so clearly exposed that even some of its practitioners - for whatever motivation - are coming to work against it. To those, probably lower-ranking, who are seriously committed to fulfilling their role as legal advocates for the accused, we as well as the defendants owe a great debt. Nor can we console ourselves that when this 'crisis' passes, the military justice system will 'reward' them: their efforts, unthinkable in normal times, are being tolerated because the military justice rock has been turned over and the hot bright light allowed in. But when it's all over, the system will eject them - nicely, of course - because their courage and independence is precisely what the system does not want.

Long live the ACLU. But please let me prepare it for a let-down: the military justice system and the Uniform Code of Military Justice are not, pace Mr. Romero, ever going to provide the substance of any Constitutional protections or requirements. Because (1) Organizationally it acknowledges itself and was designed from the get-go to be merely an arm of the command; it will do what it is told to do and find what it is told to find and that most surely includes not embarassing its bosses. Yes, an unintended consequence of Bush's ratcheting up its standard operating procedures to go after 'terrorists' was that he exposed its dark workings to the public light and that some of the more conscientious JAGs have actually turned on the system - in the detainee cases. But the system has always been 'company justice' and always will, even if its mostly collaborationist chiefs might be hiding behind the few conscientious counsel as a matter of convenience and survival in this "Germany-1945" moment in Washington, where all sorts of government officials are trying to show that they 'knew nothing' and 'saw nothing' and 'were only following orders'. (2) The Vice-President-elect's son is himself a JAG, so they have an 'in' in the new administration that will continue to protect them. And (3) for a less democratic and more regimented society, where the citizenry are expected merely to provide an obedient pool of resources for the government, then the military justice system (rather than any civiliian justice system we have now) is far more suited, already well-experienced, and deeply insinuated into law enforcement, both police and prosecutors. Expect to see civilian justice more militarized, not less.