Amid all the liberal scare talk about how letting President Bush pack the courts with right-wing Neanderthals would end civilization as we know it, it’s worth noting that the first new Bush justice, if there are any, probably won’t make the Supreme Court more conservative, and may well make it more liberal.
More than 90 percent of the nation’s voters will go (or not go) to the polls on November 5 knowing that, as far as the House of Representatives is concerned, the elections in their districts will be largely a symbolic exercise. The main reason is that the winners in most states have been predetermined by the state officials and party operatives who drew the congressional district lines.
There is, actually. Even the Bush Justice Department says so, explaining in a recent legal brief that people who sympathize with foreign terrorist groups are free to "meet with their members and advocate their causes"-which in many cases include peaceful political and humanitarian activities as well as mass murder. The First Amendment guarantees you a right to visit terrorists, speak with them, worship with them, have lunch with them, defend their methods, or sign up as a member of their group.
During a conversation on August 27, 2001, … [an agent in the FBI’s Minneapolis office told an FBI headquarters official that] he was trying to make sure that Moussaoui "did not take control of a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center." The Minneapolis agent said that the headquarters agent told him, "… You don’t have enough to show he is a terrorist." – Eleanor Hill, staff director of the joint committee investigating intelligence failures, in testimony on September 24, 2002
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist is fond of quoting a maxim of Cicero’s: Inter arma silent leges ("In time of war, the laws are silent"). At least, he said in a speech two years ago, "they speak with a muted voice."
The Bush administration’s hard-line hawks, led by Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and their top aides, exude an imperial bellicosity and a hubristic disdain for international law and opinion that could end up undermining our national security. The risk is that they will commit us to a succession of go-it-alone wars-not only in Iraq but also in Iran, North Korea, perhaps Libya, possibly Pakistan (if militant Islamists take power) and elsewhere-that would destroy our relations with Europe, isolate us even from Britain, inflame the Islamic world, and spawn legions of new terrorists.
Two recent developments dramatize how lawyer-plutocrats continue to obscenely enrich themselves by using massive asbestos lawsuits and a disgracefully dysfunctional litigation system to extort billions of dollars from American consumers every year. The lawyers blackmail mostly blameless companies, while cheating the real victims of asbestos.
Dennis Worth had been working happily and winning high performance evaluations for 16 years in the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s St. Louis office when things started going sour. In 1994, he was turned down for two promotions for which an independent merit-staffing panel had rated him "highly qualified." By 1995, it "kind of hit me," Worth recalls, "that minorities and women were being promoted and advanced, and white males were not."
I do not know what we should do about Iraq. But to reach the right answer, we should focus on the right question: What approach seems the best bet to reduce the very large risk that a thermonuclear explosion-whether engineered by Iraq, Al Qaeda, or someone else-will obliterate Washington, New York, or another American city (or cities) at some point during the next two or three decades?
The biggest civil-liberties issue that the nation has confronted since September 11-indeed, the biggest in many years-is getting only a fraction of the attention it deserves. One reason is confusion over exactly what is at stake. The real issue is not whether the government can detain "enemy combatants" in military brigs without criminal charges. It can. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit so stated in a July 12 preliminary ruling. Based on World War II precedents, it seems almost certain that the Supreme Court will agree.
