Why Does The U.S. Constitution Hate America?

Take a look below at a great piece from MSNBC. Keith Olbermann, in his inimitable style, explains that the Military Commissions Act of 2006, passed by Congress and currently awaiting the President's signature (which probably won't come until after next month's election, natch), would, among many other things, do something that the U.S. Constitution forbids: Give the President the power to eliminate a prisoner's right to petition for a Writ of Habeas Corpus at his whim. Habeas Corpus is what keeps the government from being able to throw you or me into jail arbitrarily. Keith's visual aid at the end of the piece using the Bill of Rights is perhaps a bit unsubtle, but maybe this is what it takes to get people's attention in an era that doesn't "do nuance."



C'mon all you self-styled Libertarians out there, all you guy's with "I love my country but I fear my government" bumper stickers. You should be fighting mad about this. This matters. Yes, the bill as written applies only to "aliens" (editor's note: not the Sigourney Weaver kind), and yes, in a couple of years it will probably be overturned by the Supreme Court, but that's immaterial--what this bill attempts to do is against the highest law in the land, and trite as it sounds, if they can do it in this case then there's nothing to prevent them from doing it again in the future, to anyone they deem an "enemy."

It may be that the Congress passed this bill, a bill whose supporters must know to be unconstitutional, simply as an election year ploy, a serpentine way to allow candidates to argue that their opponent wants "more rights for terrorists" instead of having to talk about their own association with an unpopular President and his unpopular war in Iraq. But this matters more than an election. This is about whether or not we value living in a free society. Its about what our founding principles actually mean to us.

Maybe there are people out there who don't care that this nation started an unnecessary war in Iraq that has now killed thousands and thousands of people (over half a million by one estimate) and has become the best recruiting tool a jihadist could ever have hoped for. Maybe there are people who don't care that thanks to Republican policies there has never been a better time in our history to be one of the super-rich, while at the same time more people than ever before live below the poverty line, real wages for working Americans haven't risen meaningfully in years, the number of Americans without health insurance is at 46.6 million and rising, and the middle class drowns in debt to pay outrageous costs of housing and higher education. Maybe there are people who don't care that the ruling party uses wedge issues and fear-mongering to divide our population and to paint those who dare speak out as some sort of America-hating Fifth Column. But dammit, everyone should care about this issue of Habeas Corpus! As long as we want to consider ourselves a nation of laws, our most fundamental rights must not be used as pawns in an election-year gambit.