Letters to the Editor
Scientician
Published Letters: 525 Editor's Choice: 1
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Relying on the Constitution
[Read the article: Democrats bear responsibility for restoring habeas corpus]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I suspect some of the Democrats who supported this bill or failed to oppose it vigorously did so under the assumption that the courts would strike down the habeas provision as unconstitutional anyway.
Clearly this is craven for legislators to trust the safety nets of the courts rather than doing what they know to be right.
Particularly when the Conservative movement has been eroding those nets to the maximum extent, because they understand something most Americans and Democrats still do not:
Sometimes, the actual text of the Constitution is unimportant, all that matters is what 5 Supreme Court Justices claim it says
Remember this quote:
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
- Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush
Do you think people with this mentality give a shit about what the Constitution actually says, or what a preponderance of evidence says the founders actually intended in any particular provision?
No, they only care in so much as they need to get 5 justices to agree it says what they want it to say. Whatever egregiously bad reasoning is given, if they want Article II to trump Habeas, Thomas, Alito and the other RWAs will be happy to agree with that "interpretation."
So, to add to Glenn's castigation of the Democrats, their far worse failure over the past 6 years was allowing Alito to reach the bench without a filibuster.
That would have been worth invoking the nuclear option. That was the fight that was worth wetting all the powder.
41 Democratic senators should have been in front of every camera talking about Alito's unamerican view of the Constituion and his extreme view of Presidential authority. After confirming Roberts, they had the credibility to oppose Alito on those grounds.
If they had done that, then they could rest reasonably assured that the Supremes would overturn the MCA. Now, I wouldn't bet on it. We're relying on Kennedy to be our 5th vote for sanity.
The MCA can be overturned this year, or in 2008 under a Democratic president. The 4 wingnuts on the Supreme court will be there well beyond that.
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DrEyeBall:
[Read the article: Democrats bear responsibility for restoring habeas corpus]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Even if habeus corpus is restored, wouldn't Bush just issue a signing statement that declared he did not have to comply with it for overriding "national security" issues? They are doing that with wiretaps and who knows what else already.
He might, but it would still be an improvement over the status quo where Congress has explicitly authorized him to ignore Habeas.
Bush did not "signing statement" away the timetables and benchmarks of the Iraq Supplemental - he vetoed. Clearly even he understands there are limits to how far he can push the Signing statement ploy.
So, let's put it on him to veto it or signing statement it, and at least give Congress a slightly cleaner conscience about the whole thing.
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Battered Wife
[Read the article: Democrats bear responsibility for restoring habeas corpus]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Totally ignoring, of course, the cult-like bloc voting of the GOP, their authoring the bill, their obsfucation of the details within the bills, signing statements, etc. This is like saying it's the battered alcoholic's wife's fault for not hiding the liquor well enough.
I look at rather than "ignoring" the GOP, but as not wasting our breath on them. They are insane, cultish right wing authoritarians who lie, steal and never learn from their mistakes. They are pathological double-highs and they're simply so despicable that we should expect literally nothing from them in way of aid in doing this.
This won't happen at all unless Democrats do it. A few token Republicans will vote for it, but nowhere near enough to make it veto proof.
And seeing as the Democrats had the filibuster option in the Senate, giving them the out of being "battered wives" isn't cutting it. They probably do emulate some of the psychology present in battered wives in that they have internalized many of the worst lies about Democrats, liberals, and the public's supposed rejection of liberalism as spread by the Broders of the world. Nonetheless, they did have the power to stop this.
However, we need them to be stronger and better than that, and now that we've put them in the majority, it's no longer even passably acceptable to allow them to hide behind their fears of what the big bad GOP machine will say about them for restoring Habeas. It's a new era, and the 2002 rules have been repudiated and no democrat should listen to anyone stuck in 2002 (or 1998 for that matter) anymore.
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Ironclad:
[Read the article: Democrats bear responsibility for restoring habeas corpus]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You raise some practical difficulties, but allowing the President to declare US Citizens to be "enemy combatants" and revoke their Habeas corpus rights is surely too much.
Also, the threat really just isn't that great to justify any comparisons to Lincoln. The US is not facing an existential threat.
Finally, you compare this to spies in the cold war. Gee, they managed to run the cold war against a dedicated malignant superpower adversary without revoking habeas. Any American could have been a soviet operative back then too, but Freedom was worth more than the expediency of allowing Eisenhower, Kennedy or Nixon to merely lock up suspected commies without trials.