Jack Balkin (Law, Yale) thinks so:
In the next few weeks, if not days, there will be votes on two very important bills. One bill would legalize the President's NSA domestic surveillance program and insulate it from judicial review. The other would ratify the President's views on military commissions, restrict the ability of defendants to see the evidence used to convict them, limit the Geneva Conventions' protections against prisoner mistreatment and outrages to human dignity, and eliminate the use of habeas corpus and the ability of an independent judiciary to inquire into the legality of the detention and treatment (or mistreatment) of human beings held at Guantanamo Bay.
I can't remember a time when two pieces of legislation were on the verge of passage that would so radically alter Americans' sense of our country--and its principles-- for the worse.
What is at stake in these two bills is whether we want the President to be free from judicial oversight and accountability; whether we want to maintain a system of secret trials with secret evidence; whether we want to announce publicly that our forces are not bound by the minimum requirements of human decency found in Common Article III of the Geneva Conventions. In their own way, each of these three issues revolves around our fidelity to the rule of law, and the meaning of America as a land where the rule of law is respected.
Our President-- with his prevarications and euphemisms, like "alternative sets of procedures"-- has been unwilling to speak the truth about what he has done in the past and what he wishes to keep doing in the future. He wants to be free of Congressional and judicial oversight when he spies on people in the United States. He wants to hold, imprison, and detain people without letting them know the evidence used to condemn and convict them. He wants to let the CIA and other operatives continue to use abusive and inhumane interrogation methods. And he wants to make sure that those who have engaged in torture and inhumane treatment are never brought to justice or held responsible for their crimes-- including especially those who authorized these terrible practices.
In short, this President wants legislation that will confirm that he is a law unto himself.
What have we come to, as a nation, when our President demands these things and expect us to follow him meekly? He seeks to maximize his power by maximizing our fear. Will we let him?.
It is bad enough that the whole "war on terror" is a fake from top to bottom; so, strictly, were the "war on drugs" and the "war on poverty." But no one in those latter cases made extraordinary claims of executive power on the basis of the abuse of a metaphor.
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