When the sunset never comes...

No surprise here:

The House voted Thursday to extend the USA Patriot Act, the nation's main anti-terrorism tool, just hours after televisions in the Capitol beamed images of a new attack in London. As similar legislation worked its way through the Senate, House Republicans generally cast the law as a valuable asset in the war on terrorism.

Most Democrats echoed that support but said they were concerned the law could allow citizens' civil liberties to be infringed. The House approved the measure 257-171, after nine hours of debate.

No guts. At all. The original Patriot Act was passed through a fog of reactionary panic, and clearly it will now be extended through a fog of that same panic. One can't possibly dignify this outcome by daring to call it the result of "thought".

Of course, you knew the majority of Republicans would support it. Yet what is truly sickening is how the Democrats -- popularly portrayed in the media as being "concerned" about civil liberties -- yet again opted to aid in cutting the Constitution. I'm sensing a pattern here: vote in favor of drastic expansions of government power with a shrug when it isn't election season, then when the campaign gets hot and heavy falsely claim to be defending our rights.

Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the top Democrat on the [House Judiciary] committee, said that while "I support the majority of the 166 provisions of the Patriot Act," the extensions could lessen accountability. "Ten years is not a sunset; 10 years is semi-permanent," he said.

Of course 10 years isn't a sunset, John. Neither is 4 years. If a new law is worrisome enough to court empty promises of "we'll consider tossing it later, honest!", then the ones supporting it just admitted that it deserves to fail.

If a "gaffe" is when a politician accidently speaks the truth, what do you call it when a politican acknowledges a truth to another person while lying to himself?

Relevance on Roberts

First off, here's some from the folks at SCOTUSblog on their nomination site. Three posts, two showing his handiwork thus far in his previous job on the DC Circuit Court and one analysis of his possible place on the dreaded "spectrum". These are too extensive to be excerpt'd, so just click the links:

Selected opinions by Judge Roberts

Judge Roberts - separate concurrences and dissents

Roberts' Place On The Ideological Spectrum of the D.C. Circuit


Also, a piece from Slate expressing worry on civil libertarian grounds (here). One small bite:

....an opinion that the 50-year-old judge joined just last week in the case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld should be seriously troubling to anyone who values civil liberties. As a member of a three-judge panel on the D.C. federal court of appeals, Roberts signed on to a blank-check grant of power to the Bush administration to try suspected terrorists without basic due-process protections....

The opinion Roberts joined, written by Judge A. Raymond Randolph for a unanimous panel....says that Congress authorized the president to set up whatever military tribunal he deems appropriate when it authorized him to use "all necessary and appropriate force" to fight terrorism in response to 9/11. While the president has claimed the authority only to try foreign suspects before the tribunals, there's nothing in the Hamdan opinion that stops him from extending their reach to any other suspected terrorist, American citizens included. This amounts to a free hand—and one Bush is not shy about extending. (emphasis mine)

And at Volokh Conspiracy we have Randy Barnett basically saying "nice resume, but who the hell are you?" here.

Last but not least, on The New Republic's site there's a nice analysis of Roberts based on his background, that also segues into a key observation on the problem with the modern view of the judicial branch -- the obsession with result overriding concern about the process used to get to it. Those with a TNR Digital subscription, click here to read it, those who don't, go ahead an' sign up for now cuz they're doing the free trial period again.


As for my own thoughts after taking all this in? I'm thinking this guy appears to be somewhat what I feared: a statist-quo type. He's surprisingly ambivalent to the agenda of cultural conservatives -- especially considering who nominated him & that Rick Santorum, Mr Fire-Breathing-Bible-Thwacker himself, has called him "brilliant" -- but what he lacks in Religious Right credentials he makes up for in capacity for questionable deferral to authority. Though there is a bright spot in that since he hasn't been on the federal bench that long there's a bit of unpredictability left in him, it's a matter of where that goes.

Basically, not good but could've been worse. It's not the end of the world, but we'll still feel crabby in the morning.

Another hath seen the light

Re: the pretty much now dead SS reform debate...

James Glassman has politely, and rather elequently, acknowledged the strength of Tyler Cowen's gangsta on the issue. He now says basically "focus on solvency & the accounts thing'll handle itself".

Nice to know some people these days still have the courage to admit error.

Bush is done picking....

Not his nose. His Supreme Court nominee:

President Bush has chosen John G. Roberts Jr., a federal appeals court judge, as his nominee to fill the first Supreme Court vacancy of his presidency, news services reported tonight.

Roberts, 50, a former official in the administrations of George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, currently serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

I know absolutely zilch about this guy, other than that going by his age Bush reaaaally wants him to stick. He just may have sat down and said "hmm, whose the youngest conceivable conservative judge I can nominate?". Will find out more later...

The problem (yes, THAT problem)

A Reason.com entry on the reaction of "the Left" to the London bombings -- which I, and some others found surprisingly off-base and more deserving of being on National Review than Reason -- prompted me to respond on their blog entry for it. I share it with you below for convenience:

-One side says muslim extremists attack because "they hate our freedoms", and believes any shift in policy would be appeasement.

-The other side says that they attack solely because of our policy, and believes that it would all stop if we simply left Saudi Arabia and stopped supporting Israel.

As usual, the truth is somewhere inbetween.

The ideological leadership of these groups -- Osama himself, the radical clerics, etcetera -- would hate "the west" no matter what we did and as a result are completely impossible to deal with. Nothing short of a bullet to the brain will stop them, it's only a matter of whether it will be us doing the job or their co-religionists that are hanging on the fence about it.

The grunts of the islamo-supremecist force -- those people blowing themselves up in Iraq, bombing trains in Europe, the 9/11 hijackers -- though they like the message about our "decadence", they only buy it because our policies seem to confirm what they're being told. Many of them have an internal conflict where they want the wealth and status of "the west" without the sin, failing to realize that modernity and strict religion are irreconcileable, so eventually they're pushed off the edge. Some of these people can be coaxed into something less violent, but it's a race against time, a very difficult one due to the clash between what they want here and what they want in what they believe to be the next life.

What has to be done is to help the 1st group meet as early a death as possible, while convincing the 2nd group that life here is worth staying to enjoy it. This is why we're treading water in Iraq & terrorism by muslim extremists is still going strong, we're trying to do the 2nd task with the military, whose job is solely to handle the 1st.

What we need is a policy that will say "tell you what: liberalize and tell the nutjob clerics to take a flying f*ck off a cliff and we'll disengage like you want. If not, then those people have to die. Your choice, you want us gone or not?"

Who's the radical now?

Here's an NY Times editorial (predictably) barking about the possibility of a "radical ideologue" being nominated to the Supreme Court.

Now, that could be an understandable charge depending on what is meant by the term. So naturally the question is, what do they mean?

"[right-wing] Activists want a justice who will radically reinterpret the Commerce Clause and other parts of the Constitution to tie the hands of Congress, so it no longer has the power to protect people from discrimination, unsafe working conditions and pollution..."

First of all, the original use of the commerce clause was to maintain free-trade between the states, period. The current "interpretation" is that congress can do whatever it wants whenever it wants, up to and including carting AIDS patients off to jail for having medical marijuana regardless of whether any state line was ever crossed in the transaction. Take a look at who agreed with the latter opinion: other than Scalia, who basically sold out Original Intent so he could slap at "left-coast hippies", they tended Left, not Right.

As for "tieing the hands of congress: that's the point of the Constitution, to restrain the government. The Founders saw no reason to believe that politicians could be trusted with unlimited powers, so they explicitly laid out what they can and cannot do under our system. Whoever wrote that comment must've flunked History class.

If undoing the years of ignorance of the Constitution is a "radical" thing to do, then a radical is exactly what we need. I fear actually that Bush, lacking a true limited-government bone anywhere in his body, will fail to nominate one.