"This is wrong. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American," said Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the committee’s top Democrat. He said it was intended to choke off access to Guantanamo to "ensure that the Bush-Cheney administration will never again be embarrassed by a United States Supreme Court decision reviewing its unlawful abuses of power." Quoted in WaPo
Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh said that "the image of Congress rushing to strip jurisdiction from the courts in response to a politically created emergency is really quite shocking, and it’s not clear that most of the members understand what they’ve done." Quoted in WaPo
An hour’s debate and a 65-34 vote. Twelve Democrats join the Republicans–Lieberman, of course, was one of them. Olympia Snow was absent; Chafee voted No with the Dems. Speaker Denny Hastert said that the Dems wanted to coddle terrorists. Oh Lord, that sure explains it.
I was speaking to my German nextdoor neighbors about it, and they said it feels to them like 1933. It starts with little things, they said. They’ve been here from Berlin for a little over a year, and they say they’ve been amazed at how complacent the Americans are, how unaware. The Berlin Wall, he said, was not taken down by the government, but by the people. Where are the people in this country? They’re out shopping or involved in their fantasy football league, I guess. She asked me in all seriousness if I have an exit strategy. Alarmist, snarky Europeans reacting with a typical anti-American sneer? Maybe, but I don’t think so. They’re not like that, really. They’re just really concerned.
Right now, I’m too down about all this to know what to think, and I haven’t the heart to write any more about it. Let Stephen Colbert point to the Kafkaesque quality of the world into which we have now moved. Check out his bit here.
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