Who Lost Habeas Corpus?

I've been snowed under with work responsibilities for the last couple of weeks and simply have had no time to post anything worth reading here.  I am working on an essay that attempts to understand why so many smart people could get things so terribly wrong, and why they continue to do so.

But in the meanwhile I recommend this New Yorker New Yorker piece on habeas corpus. Nothing was more a more disturbing indication to me about how we have lost our way in the political sphere than the passage of the Military Commissions Act.  I am still astonished by it, and cannot understand how it could have passed so easily and with so little debate.  And with so little negative commentary in the MSM.  Think what you will of Olberman--I can understand why some people find him annoying--but he's the only talking head in the MSM I'm aware of who spoke out about this with the appropriate outrage. 

In any event, this is an issue we cannot allow to die into forgetfulness.  It's legislation that must be reversed in the next congress if it's not reversed in the courts.  And pieces like this one in the New Yorker are part of the educational effort needed to achieve that goal.  It's an object lesson in why you can never trust "moderates" if moderate means splitting the difference with tyranny.  Guys like Specter, McCain, Graham, and Warner--so-called moderates of that ilk, have been taken off my list of people I may disagree with but whom I can take seriously.  Specter's assumption that the courts will take care of it hardly absolves him of his gross irresponsibility in voting for this legislation.  He and the others are now where they probably always belonged--on the list of ordinary political hacks.

Comments

[probligo]

One of the principles underpinning the Westminster system of government is that known as "Collective Responsibility". No, this is not some kind of communist plot. It is the process by which the Government takes responsibility for its decisions. Not that (in the normal course of events) one member is held to blame for a decision, but that the blame is "shared around". Hence one can end up with an entire Cabinet saying (individually) they thought "A" was a bad idea, but we all voted for it...

Sounds to me like it is no different on the Hill.