NY Times: Mourning in Amerika

Yet another long NY Times editorial eulogy for the Bill of Rights.

This past Sunday's plangent laundry list of rising fascism offers so many major bullet-pointed assaults on the Constitution that revising the "Patriot" Act and closing Gitmo appear at the end as an afterthought.

To wit:

Restore Habeas Corpus
Ban Torture, Really
Close the C.I.A. Prisons
Account for ‘Ghost Prisoners’
Ban Extraordinary Rendition
Tighten the Definition of Combatant
Screen Prisoners Fairly and Effectively
Ban Tainted Evidence
Ban Secret Evidence
Better Define ‘Classified’ Evidence
Respect the Right to Counsel

Land of the free. Yeah, right. Tell me another.

Secret Is As Secret Does

An editorial from Monday's NY Times:

Monday 19 February 2007

A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night. So it was with a provision quietly tucked into the enormous defense budget bill at the Bush administration's behest that makes it easier for a president to override local control of law enforcement and declare martial law.

The provision, signed into law in October, weakens two obscure but important bulwarks of liberty. One is the doctrine that bars military forces, including a federalized National Guard, from engaging in law enforcement. Called posse comitatus, it was enshrined in law after the Civil War to preserve the line between civil government and the military. The other is the Insurrection Act of 1807, which provides the major exemptions to posse comitatus. It essentially limits a president's use of the military in law enforcement to putting down lawlessness, insurrection and rebellion, where a state is violating federal law or depriving people of constitutional rights.

The newly enacted provisions upset this careful balance. They shift the focus from making sure that federal laws are enforced to restoring public order. Beyond cases of actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or to any "other condition."

Changes of this magnitude should be made only after a thorough public airing. But these new presidential powers were slipped into the law without hearings or public debate. The president made no mention of the changes when he signed the measure, and neither the White House nor Congress consulted in advance with the nation's governors.

There is a bipartisan bill, introduced by Senators Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and Christopher Bond, Republican of Missouri, and backed unanimously by the nation's governors, that would repeal the stealthy revisions. Congress should pass it. If changes of this kind are proposed in the future, they must get a full and open debate.

No further comment needed, other than to note that that bipartisan bill has a snowball's chance in Hell of being enacted.

Imperium Americanum: History Repeating

Here we are deep in the last third of Gibbon.

Almost 45 years ago, Ceasar died in Dallas, the long knives replaced by a hail of bullets, with the devolution of honor being such that the conspirators hid behind contract killers bought from the mafia rather than looking their prince in the eye as they betrayed him and murdered their republic.

Wars and foreign intrigues followed, as the conspirators, now the rulers of empire, fed at the trough of money and power. In Rome, uneasy parents, witness to the unspeakable, soon enough gave way to sons and daughters who reveled in wealth and decadence.

The rich were never richer, the poor never more despised. The outward forms and structures were maintained, from familiarity and convenience, but all Romans knew that democracy had been supplanted by dictatorship, that Rome had sacrificed its soul to grasp at the delirious prize of world domination.

The pathetic spectacle of the current Senate's inability to pass a non-binding resolution censuring the conduct of the Iraq war should have been played out in togas.

The craven politics, posturing and rank hypocrisy of the past weeks' maneuverings have reached new lows even for Congress--a profoundly saddening and shameless display that reveals an institution that is impotent, dysfunctional and frankly irrelevant. The stink of rotten decadence hangs over the farce: Congress is defunct as a viable, let alone co-equal, branch of government.

Enter Nero, playing air guitar.