Letters to the Editor
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@e_five
The following is excerpted from the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005:
(e) Judicial Review of Detention of Enemy Combatants-
(1) IN GENERAL- Section 2241 of title 28, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following:
'(e) Except as provided in section 1005 of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider--
'(1) an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the Department of Defense at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; or...
(the ellipses at the end are mine)
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Thanks, Glenn
'Keep up the good work, Glenn. You're one of the best!'
No, no, no, no, no....you ARE the best. The sheer intelligence and surgical precision with which you do your work are truly inspiring in a world that's definitely on the scary side. Thank-you more than I can ever say. I really believe that history will hold you up as an American hero of the first order, and we are the ones to most immediately benifit(sp?) from your work on the ground, right now.
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An elegant exchange
Paul and Glenn, thank you for another step toward clarity about our political dialectic. One of the worst things afflicting our body politic these days, sadly evident in many of the comments here, is that people see nouns more clearly than they see verbs.
This, of course, is what the swarm of propagandists for our elite action-figures rely on, that everyone should be paralyzed by the enormity of what is and what might be, leaving their paymasters free to bite off all the tasty chunks for themselves and retire to their gated communities to gnaw on them while we remain stunned outside their walls.
Should we wait until the siege engines come up? Well, perhaps. In the meantime, though, tunnel-rat is an honorable profession. Every day, another shovel-full of bebop-o's dirt. Even better, when the day comes when we finally start dragging them en masse out of their compromised fortresses, there'll be plenty left to toss on top of their carcasses.
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the letter I sent, such as it is...
The shameful The Military Commissions Act of 2006 must be countered by new legislation in support of habeas corpus and other foundation liberties guaranteed by our constitution.
This is the time to take a stand, the only honorable stand, in support of reconstructing our constitutional rights in opposition to the authoritarian tendencies of the Bush administration.
Represent us, represent the constitution, represent the 700 year legacy of habeas corpus, and do honor to our founding fathers by rejecting this affront to the people's right of holding their government accountable.
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Well. Harrumph.
First of all, I take the position that the Republic of Our Founders has already been overthrown. We now live under a pseudo-Constitutional Autocracy. Occasionally, but rarely, lip service is paid to that Constitution -- when it suits the interests of the Autocracy. But it is neither a binding nor and enforceable document on that Autocracy. As the Autocrat has been rumored to opine: "It's just a piece of paper."
It is my position that Congress (both Parties) has been complicit in this overthrow, just as the Supreme Court was the chief instigator of it. A majority of Congress -- though not necessarily a majority of both Parties -- has gone along with or has actively enabled the consolidation of this Autocracy, once they agreed to its imposition in the first place.
By all means, restore habeus corpus, but understand what it does and doesn't mean in the context of a Lawless Autocracy. The Autocrat will decide whether to allow habeus suits to proceed -- or not. In other words, after all the parades and the trumpets and bowing down before the Constitution (Now Restored, Huzzah!), the Autocrat is still the one who decides whether and to what extent such a right may be pursued, and further, the Autocrat decides who may or may not exercise that right.
In other words, though "restored" there is still no real right to habeus corpus unless and until the Autocrat so decress. You watch.
By now, we should have had plenty of experience with how this works. But Glenn, bless his heart, doesn't seem to accept my premise -- that is, that Our Self-Governing Constitutional Republic has already been overthrown and its remaining institutions are being incrementally subverted as we speak. Instead, he sees the Republic standing strong, going through some rough waters, perhaps, but with its Self-Correcting Institutions well on the way to restoration and healing, if we only keep working at it and give it enough time.
I think that's a very naive point of view.
No, something truly dreadful happened when the government was handed over to the current Regime and the Congress of the United States agreed to it.
We're six years into this Lawless Autocracy, and we should know quite well by now that the incremental changes have largely gone in one direction: the undermining and subversion of the institutions of government.
It's good that Some Dems are looking into and exposing some of the worst of the abuses of the Autocracy, but they are not even close to reversing (or even addressing) the fundamental subversion of the Constitution itself, and their own complicity in that subversion.
We've got a long way to go to get our country back. Or maybe it would be just as well to get comfortable with the New America and be grateful for anything we get.
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Ben Alpers
There's certainly as much, if not more, groupthink on the right of the blogosphere as on the left. But I believe that the left of the blogosphere is more institutionally tied to the Democratic Party than the right of the blogosphere is to the GOP.
Most of us have grasped the pointlessness of third parties. It's not bias, it's social and political science. See Duverger's Law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_Law
It's a law. Many of us would welcome the institutional changes necessary for third, or fourth, parties to become viable. The more the merrier, I say.
I say this in part on the basis of a 2005 study done for the New Politics Institute by two prominent progressive bloggers, Matt Stoller and Chris Bowers. Entitled "The Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere: A New Force in American Politics," the study concluded that one of the differences between the right and the left of the blogosphere was that the left was more partisan. Stoller and Bowers saw this as an advantage:
Progressive blogs are far more likely to identify with the Democratic Party than conservative bloggers are to identify with the Republican Party. This leads to greater contact between progressive bloggers and the Democratic Party than conservative bloggers have with the Republican Party. It also means more influence.
As I've already indicated, while agreeing about the importance of the ties between prominent left bloggers and the Democratic Party, I don't think this ultimately is an advantage for the left of the blogosphere.
("The Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere" can be downloaded here: http://www.newpolitics.net/files/The-Emergence-of-the-Progressive-Blogosphere.pdf )
I'll cut you the slack that you are just misguided and don't understand, but you sound like the Versailles media or Jonathan Chait at TNR.
Read this:
http://crookedtimber.org/2007/05/04/chait-on-the-netroots/
...As other bloggers point out, this purported equivalence doesn’t pass the giggle test.
As for the claim that netroots bloggers’ attacks on “fairness,” “moderation” etc are motivated by their fundamental distaste for compromise and honest intellectual debate – it’s nonsense. Again, netroots’ criticisms of ‘moderation,’ ‘bipartisanship’ and so on are historically limited. I had one discussion with a prominent netroots blogger about bipartisanship which is worth quoting.
Bipartisanship isn’t necessarily bad. Bipartisanship in the current political atmosphere, where only one side is being bipartisan, is bad. In the six years that Bush has been in power, when has he compromised? … There is nothing inherently bad in bipartisanship. There is something inherently bad in bipartisanship with this crowd.
This isn’t a statement that compromise and moderation are evil in any absolute sense. It’s a specific argument that in our current circumstances (or more particularly, the circumstances before the mid-terms, when I had this discussion) compromise is a bad idea. It’s furthermore an argument based on a real and substantial analysis, which I think is mostly right, and which for me is the single most valuable thing that the netroots have come up with. The short version of the netroots argument, as I understand it, is this. The ground rules of American political debate have been set in ways that disadvantage those on the left side of the spectrum. Prominent pundits repeatedly call for “moderation” and for “bipartisan solutions” which tend to favour both Republican interests and the interests of those on the right of the Democratic party at the expense of left and center Democrats, because the supposed center of American political debate has been shifted considerably to the right by a concerted effort on the part of conservative opinion makers. Even more to the point – this shifting of the center allows ‘moderate’ Democrats to score political brownie points at the expense of their party by repeatedly seeking to distance themselves from it, undermining in the process any possibility that the Democrats could bring through real political change...