Good news, of sorts, Glenn Greenwald endorses the Patriot Act, kind of, sort of:
The Military Commissions Act of 2006 is, without question, the single worst law enacted during the Bush presidency, and is one of the most destructive laws passed in the last several decades. It is not merely a bad law. It vests in the President the power to detain people indefinitely with no meaningful opportunity to contest the government’s accusations. That is the very power the Founders sought first and foremost to prohibit.
It is interesting which law passed over the last six years Greenwald singles out for the most condemnation. Most leftards would reserve the ultimate rage for the Patriot Act. People who love the Constitution would be most offended by McCain-Feingold.
Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform, or the aforementioned McCan-Feingold trashes the First Amendment by granting the state the power to restrict political speech, the very speech the First Amendment was intended to protect.
Yet unlike Free Speech, habeas corpus is a neither granted by the Constitution nor explicitly protected by it. The only mention of habeas corpus in the Constitution are the provisions giving Congress the power to suspend it, which is exactly what the Military Commissions Act of 2006 does.
Habeas corpus is concept rooted in English Common Law. While habeas corpus is not trivial, it is not explicitly protected by the Constitution. The exact nature of habeas corpus is beyond the scope of this article.
Greenwald fundamentally mischaracterizes the MCA. The act does not give the president power to detain people, as in ordinary citizens. Rather the MCA reaffirms the power of the president to detain enemy combatants, a power the president, as commander-in-chief, has always had. The MCA gives detainees the right to challenge their classification as enemy combatants That is all the constitutional protection necessary.
Greenwald seeks to give constitutional protection to illegal alien enemy combatants not available to legal combatants. In fact, Greenwald is more concerned about giving new rights to illegal enemy combatants than he is with protecting fundamental constitutional rights of American citizens. Who’s side is Greenwald on?
(H/T photo: Mother Jones )
