Apparently, you can go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
Compelling as this weekend’s Hollywood offerings were, I think I’m going to hold out for the film versions of “Hungry, Hungry Hippos” and Who Moved My Cheese?
Adam Serwer has an excellent piece about the House GOP stopping an important modification to the NDAA. I would frame the issue differently, however:
At least it’s on the record: Most House Republicans support the indefinite detention without trial of American citizens.
This is, I suppose, a politically attractive way of framing the debate — certainly, one hears the idea that it’s uniquely bad to exercise arbitrary executive power against American citizens among the progressive blogosphere and its commentariat a lot. The only problem is that the citizenship status of terrorist suspects is legally irrelevant and, in my view, is also morally irrelevant. If someone is an enemy combatant, they aren’t entitled to ordinary due process irrespective of their citizenship status — American citizens fighting for the Nazis didn’t have to be read their Miranda rights. (Well, Miranda wouldn’t be decided for another 20 years, but you can see what I’m driving at.) Conversely, if someone is an ordinary criminal suspect, they can’t be arbitrarily killed or detained whether they’re American citizens or not. The Bill of Rights is a restriction on government power that doesn’t — and shouldn’t — make any reference to citizenship.
Fortunately, as Adam has pointed out before citizenship status is also irrelevant to the proposed bill, which deals with suspects picked up on American soil as opposed to American citizens. This is obviously a critically necessary restriction. The core legal difficulty is organized terrorism represents a grey area that is like ordinary criminal behavior in some respects but not in others, and I’m open to the possibility that the “war on terror” might require modified rules in some cases. In addition to the necessity of showing evidence to some independent body, however, another key condition of designated someone an enemy combatant rather than a criminal suspect is that they be beyond the effective reach of civil authorities. A terrorist suspect in rural Yemen presents a real dilemma. A terrorist suspect in the United States, however, is (regardless of citizenship status) a criminal suspect and should be treated accordingly.
Until the NDAA is modified along the lines of the proposed bill, it is unacceptable. Although I don’t have a lot of confidence that this will hold up as it goes up the appellate chain, this is why it was appropriate for Judge Forrest to block enforcement of the indefinite detention provisions.
Ah, Mittens. Sure, financial institutions losing some money, what’s the big deal? Some counterparty must be making money — what could possibly go wrong? Stay illiquid and unregulated, my friends!
In the wake of the pathetic demise of his pet AmericansUnityElect0812 project, Matt Miller responds to what he calls the False Equivalency police:
The reason I’ve wanted an independent candidacy has nothing to do with faulting Democrats and Republicans equally. It has to do with changing the boundaries of debate. That desire comes from holding the following five convictions:
1) The president and the Democrats’ agenda today is much better for the country than the Republicans’.
2) At the same time, the outer limits of Democratic ambition are not nearly equal to the challenges we face.
That’s nice. But it only means that people were being too charitable in Miller’s case. Without the false premise of Gush-Borism, supporting a major two-party effort that tries to draw primarily from supporters of what you consider the better party is completely irrational, since the major impact of such a movement would be to put the worse party in office.
The rest of Miller’s argument is just the usual take-your-toys-an-go-home narcissism; he’s vaguely similar to the Democrats but he wants a third party that will admit that he’s completely right on every last policy detail. (And going beyond the usual “mememememe” he seems to take as self-evident that an open-ended third party primary would inevitably choose a candidate who shares his views down the line.) This is even less explicable when it comes not from the left, where a lot of views are genuinely underrepresented in American political discourse, but from the “radical center” where views are greatly overrepresented in the pundit class.
Anyway, I’m afraid I’m going to continue to hold out for a third party that will agree with me about everything.
The D.C. Circuit has upheld the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act, in a case likely to be taken by the Supreme Court (but hopefully not now.)
Propublica’s timeline on Obama and civil liberties is very useful. A few notes:
If this is the stuff that the heirs of Breitbart’s hack empire want to frontload, I’m going to be especially entertained by the B material. Meanwhile, not to be outdone in any hack sweepstakes, Roger L. Simon says they’re conceding too much in their (I swear I’m not making this up) “extraordinary” story.
…and when Simon and Jack Cashill get together…wow. It’s like the Ghostbusters sequel Bill Murray wisely declined, crossing streams of idiocy.
I have a follow-up to Jamelle’s piece talking about the various other ways Romney will be horrible. In particular, we’d be looking at a Supreme Court where Antonin Scalia would have to look to his right to see the median vote, with federal appeals courts to match. I also explain why you shouldn’t be fooled by guff about how Supreme Court justices are unpredictable. Justices chosen for ideological reasons are about as unpredictable as Bill Kristol, and post-Souter all Republican appointments will be made for ideological reasons.
Andrew Cohen points us to this exhaustive study by the Columbia Human Rights Law Review about the execution of Carlos DeLuna. I will have more when I’ve had the chance to read the book next week, but the bottom line is that 1)the evidence against DeLuna is exceptionally weak, for the familiar reasons — inept defense counsel, particularly useless eyewitness ID, no forensic evidence tied to DeLuna, police and prosecutors who decided to ignore these things once they had focused on a suspect. And the case against Carlos Hernandez, who repeatedly admitted to having actually committed the murder, is much stronger.
But, of course, as Antonin Scalia would say, since it’s never been established in a court of law because there would be no way of doing so, we can just keep saying that America has never executed an innocent man!
Jamelle Bouie is definitive:
Romney is running for president as a right-wing Republican with right-wing ideas, and it is absurd to think that he would suddenly revert to the Mitt who governed Massachusetts. Even if he wanted to, he would first have to contend with a conservative movement that sees itself as the dominant partner in this relationship. “If the Republicans take the Senate, I definitely think you’ll see Romney have to follow what the House and Senate are doing,” says Brendan Steinhauser, director of federal and state campaigns for FreedomWorks, one of the largest organizations in the Tea Party orbit. “Our goal is to drive that, so that we have more conservatives in the Senate, and we’re setting the agenda.”
If conservatives expect to set the agenda—and if Romney, as president, wants to maintain their support—then he can’t govern from the center. Nor does he plan to.
Which would mean 1)a massive upward redistribution of wealth combined with 2)huge deficits and lower marginal tax rates that would further constrain future governments. And Jamelle doesn’t talk about a lot of other important factors, such as the Supreme Court, an NLRB that refuses to enforce labor law, etc.
Paul Campos, Above the Law 2011 Lawyer of the Year
Erik Loomis, HNN Cliopatria 2011 Best Series of Posts
