I understand where you are coming from. Large government bureaucracies, regardless of whatever good intentions may have originally launched them, ALWAYS morph into self-serving, self-dealing, and corrupted regimes of power and influence peddling of various sundry associations (good thing I am not cynical, huh?)

As for your other point, the reality is both sides play that game. Hell, look at the reactions about filibusters right now. In politics, the thinking seems to normally be that what is sauce for the goose is only for the goose, and if the gander comes around, throw it in the dumpster and pretend the sauce never existed.

I recently re-read 1984 (hence the reference to it earlier). Between camera’s on every intersection, government monitoring of phone and internet records, and the ability for our political leaders to do complete 180′s on just about any issue at just about any time, it is depressing really to compare this ‘totalitarian’ warning to the current definition of ‘liberal democracy’ (in the classic sense of the word liberal, not the party sense).

AR-I should not have said that conservatives only fear an expansion of an executive power when a liberal is the one who is holding that power— I heard that very example of Hillary on conservative talk radio (actually I heard a few conservative pundits say this) and I generalized.

In reality, I know that true conservatives don’t trust an enlarged federal government. I actually have moved closer to them on that point, I don’t trust it either any more. There’s too much concentration of power in Washington, and too much special interest money involved in important decision-making. The media gets spun like everyone else, and reality gets buried.

I used the example of Hillary to illustrate that this should NOT be a partisan issue, and that those folks who are in favor of expanded powers under Bush should think about what this means with President Hillary (and vice versa).

You probably won’t read this, as the caravan has passed, but I find this issue troubling regardless of who is in the White House.

I should have worded my comment better. My bad

I fear we’ve begun to approach the law like a dunk college kid at Denny’s at 3AM staring at the menu so hard the text has begun to blur.

Not all conservatives feel that way. I would go so far as to say real conservatives, in the sense of what that word used to mean, could not possible support a law or group of laws that basically lowers us to the level of Cold War Russia.

The mere thought of vesting ANY government branch, official or office with an unlimited power of detainment, without charges, review, access to lawyers, or appeal, indefinitely and incommunicado, is as Orwellian an environment as that I can imagine. In fact, add in the current administrations positions on torture, and it IS straight out of 1984.

I cannot believe (well, I can, so let’s say I hope as fervently as possible) that SCOTUS will review this expeditiously, and indeed ‘slap the (P)resident’ AND Congress, which is fully complicit in this current version.

You posted your second comment as I was cogitating on your first.

I agree that we should be less concerned with the detainees than the future of the republic. This is huge stuff. In my humble view, Hamdan was the most important Supreme Court case in many years — and we’re now going to have an encore.

You make several good points.

That said, please note that during oral arguments on Hamdan the justices kept coming back to the fact that the executive and legislative branches usurped the high court’s powers in suspending the hallowed habeas principal.

This was a no-brainer for a clearly insulted majority of justices who were utterly unconvinced by the government’s weak arguments, which boiled down to the president being able to do anything he wanted because of the War on Terror. This showdown tended to get lost in news stories and analyses, which focused on the justices’ rebuke regarding the UCMJ and Geneva Conventions.

Despite some minor tinkering with the new Military Commissions Act that the appeals court upheld today, the landscape remains pretty much indentical to what it was when Hamdan was argued.

I do not believe that even Roberts’ powerful voice can tip the scales. In fact, it is possible that he will side the with majority.

Do we want to give President Hillary almost unchecked authority, when backed by a compliant Democratic Congress?

This post should give us all pause to think.

I would disagree with your contention that “the Supremes will again slap the President even with Roberts participating”.

1) Roberts is a powerful jurist, and respected by his peers. In participating he will not simply be a vote, but his voice will be influential. 2) The Supremes had bounced this back to Congress, and in the recent law Congress stated that it supported the Executive. In effect, two branches of government against the third.

The court ruling you cite references this point, and the importance of the law that was passed. As the majority ruling declares: “The arguments are creative but not cogent. To accept them would be to defy the will of Congress,” Judge A. Raymond Randolph wrote.

In effect, by simply repeating their earlier ruling, the Supremes would be defying the expressly stated will of Congress as well as the Executive.

How the Court will rule is beyond me…but I would imagine that, unlike their “kicking the ball down the field” in their earlier decision, they will have to clearly address the Constitutional issue here.

Will the Court override both Congress and the Executive? As you indicate, this will be an historical constitutional battle.