A Little Less Free

Today is a very sad day for the country, and while the prospects for a Democratic takeover of Congress look decent, it will be very difficult to reverse this trend of the imperial executive after six years of rubber-stamping.

Today the torture bill was signed into law, and the President never looks and sounds happier than when he's depriving people of human rights. So he was ebullient at the signing ceremony.

"With the bill I'm about to sign, the men our intelligence officials believe orchestrated the murder of nearly 3,000 innocent people will face justice," Bush said.

A coalition of religious groups staged a protest against the bill outside the White House, shouting "Bush is the terrorist" and "Torture is a crime." About 15 of the protesters, standing in a light rain, refused orders to move. Police arrested them one by one.

Among those the United States hopes to try are Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, as well as Ramzi Binalshibh, an alleged would-be 9/11 hijacker, and Abu Zubaydah, who was believed to be a link between Osama bin Laden and many al-Qaida cells.

"It is a rare occasion when a president can sign a bill that he knows will save American lives," Bush said. "I have that privilege this morning."

And so with the stroke of a pen, 800 years of habeas corpus rights have been removed, and now the world's purported leader in freedom and human rights can indefinitely detain anyone, US citizen or not, at the whim of the chief executive, without that detainee being able to question the nature of his detention. As Anthony Romero explains:

The American Civil Liberties Union said the new law is "one of the worst civil liberties measures ever enacted in American history."

"The president can now, with the approval of Congress, indefinitely hold people without charge, take away protections against horrific abuse, put people on trial based on hearsay evidence, authorize trials that can sentence people to death based on testimony literally beaten out of witnesses, and slam shut the courthouse door for habeas petitions," said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero.

"Nothing could be further from the American values we all hold in our hearts than the Military Commissions Act," he said.

The next few weeks will have me brimming with optimism over the prospects of actually turning this country around and solving the surfeit of problems we all face. But the damage this Administration has done to American Constitutional democracy will be extremely difficult to reverse. No executive, Democratic or Republican, is likely to willingly give up the power invested in his/her office. And certain provisions in bad laws like the Military Commissions Act have as their primary function the weakening of checks and balances from the legislative or judicial branches.

This is also going to be near-impossible because of what Digby calls "bipartisan nothingness":

Now that the Republicans have successfully moved the political center so far to the right that they drove themselves over the cliff, we must stop all this "partisan bickering" as if the Democrats have been equally partisan and therefore can ask for and expect the right to meet them halfway, which they never, ever do. That means we must let their most heinous ideas congeal into conventional wisdom, let their criminal behavior go unpunished, clean up the global disaster they've created, do the heavy lifting to fix the deficit they caused. While we're fixing things, they'll count their ill-gotten gains, catch their breath and gear up to trash the place all over again.

Modern bipartisanship can be simply defined as Democrats repeatedly getting taken to the cleaners by Republicans. Until the rules of the game are changed it will remain so whether Democrats are in the majority or not. That pathetic Charlie Brown with the football ritual is what Joe Lieberman is running on and what Joe Klein is angling for with his Blankslate Obama love-fest. (Norquist called it date rape but that's too kind -- the Liebermans and Kleins love being in the spotlight giving wingnuts lapdances. They enjoy every minute of their rightwing orgy --- they just don't want to take responsibility when they turn up with wingnut transmitted diseases.)

This false equivalence, to compare removing habeas corpus and allowing torture to 3% increases in the capital gains tax, is UNBELIEVABLY dangerous. It's this he-said she-said style that has turned our electorate's brains to mush. This law should not be looked at through the lens of politics (calling it "a victory" for the President or whatever); its specific policy debases all Americans, and that's more important.

Vyan at DailyKos has much much more. Lawsuits are being filed, and the hope is that these have a chance to go up the ladder to the Supreme Court. The question is whether or not these cases can gain standing, as the law appears to have denied these lawsuits (removing democracy in the service of unclogging the courts of 200 cases. Ridiculous).

Support Amnesty International and the Center for Constitutional Rights in their efforts to restore an America we all can believe in.