Category: The Dish

The more you read, the more you see what a body-blow this is to our quasi-monarchical president. The ruling clearly states that the interrogation methods currently authorized by Rumsfeld and the CIA are unlawful. There’s also a warning against the over-broad executive interpretation of Congress’s Authorization for the Use of Military Force – which implicates the NSA program. Big news, methinks. The Founders have not been disproved. This constitutional system works, even in wartime, and even under an administration with demonstrable contempt for the rule of law.

Intellectual porn for classical liberals and conservatives of doubt, courtesy of Greg Mankiw and Google.

King George, it appears, is still just a president; and the constitution still guards against his arbitrary use of power. But according to Marty Lederman, the Hamdan ruling is much more significant than the mere war-crime trials point. The ruling reinstitutes Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, and forces the president to obey the law. Money quote:

The Court appears to have held that Common Article 3 of Geneva aplies to the conflict against Al Qaeda. That is the HUGE part of today’s ruling. The commissions are the least of it. This basically resolves the debate about interrogation techniques, because Common Article 3 provides that detained persons "shall in all circumstances be treated humanely," and that "[t]o this end," certain specified acts "are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever"‚Äîincluding "cruel treatment and torture," and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." This standard, not limited to the restrictions of the due process clause, is much more restrictive than even the McCain Amendment. See my further discussion here.

This almost certainly means that the CIA’s interrogation regime is unlawful, and indeed, that many techniques the Administation has been using, such as waterboarding and hypothermia (and others) violate the War Crimes Act (because violations of Common Article 3 are deemed war crimes).

If I’m right about this, it’s enormously significant.

I’m not legally qualified to render a judgment. But if the court has finally managed to force this president to reverse his abandonment of Geneva, then it is a great day indeed.

Steven Bainbridge writes on another quiet expansion of executive power. Remember: these "emergency" powers now rest on the concept of a permanent emergency. Which is to say, they are designed to redesign the American constitution as one in which the presidency exercizes quasi-monarchical power.

Studio City, California, 10 am.

The andrewsullivan.com redirect server is down again. The blog still works at Time.com. All I can say is that we have been working on a transition now for a month, that any day, we will no longer have even a risk of this happening again (because we have moved the andrewsullivan.com redirect to Time’s servers). I’m sorry. It always seems to happen on a major news day as well.

From a subtle and excellent speech by Senator Barack Obama on the relationship between faith and politics:

A few days after I won the Democratic nomination in my U.S. Senate race, I received an email from a doctor at the University of Chicago Medical School that said the following:

‚ÄúCongratulations on your overwhelming and inspiring primary win … I write to express my concerns that may, in the end, prevent me from supporting you.‚Äù

The doctor described himself as a Christian who understood his commitments to be ‘totalizing.’ His faith led him to a strong opposition to abortion and gay marriage, although he said that his faith also led him to question the idolatry of the free market and quick resort to militarism that seemed to characterize much of the Republican agenda.

But the reason the doctor was considering not voting for me was not simply my position on abortion. Rather, he had read an entry that my campaign had posted on my website, which suggested that I would fight ‘right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman’s right to choose.’ The doctor went on to write:

‘Whatever your convictions, if you truly believe that those who oppose abortion are all ideologues driven by perverse desires to inflict suffering on women, then you, in my judgment, are not fair-minded … You know that we enter times that are fraught with possibilities for good and for harm, times when we are struggling to make sense of a common polity in the context of plurality, when we are unsure of what grounds we have for making any claims that involve others … I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion, only that you speak about this issue in fair-minded words.’

Fair-minded words.

So I looked at my website and found the offending words.  In fairness to them, my staff had written them using standard Democratic boilerplate language to summarize my pro-choice position during the Democratic primary, at a time when some of my opponents were questioning my commitment to protect Roe v. Wade.

Re-reading the doctor’s letter, though, I felt a pang of shame. It is people like him who are looking for a deeper, fuller conversation about religion in this country. They may not change their positions, but they are willing to listen and learn from those who are willing to speak in fair-minded words.  Those who know of the central and awesome place that God holds in the lives of so many, and who refuse to treat faith as simply another political issue with which to score points.

So I wrote back to the doctor, and I thanked him for his advice.  The next day, I circulated the email to my staff and changed the language on my website to state in clear but simple terms my pro-choice position. And that night, before I went to bed, I said a prayer of my own ‚Äì a prayer that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me.

Read the whole thing. My favorite line:

Faith doesn’t mean that you don‚Äôt have doubts. You need to come to church in the first place precisely because you are first of this world, not apart from it.

Obama is more than the hype.

Loved this anecdote from NRO:

When British playwright Tom Stoppard was a young man, reports the Sunday Telegraph, he wanted a job at the London Evening Standard. "The editor, Charles Wintour, a chilly Fleet Street veteran, quizzed him sternly: ‘I gather you’re interested in politics,’ said Wintour. ‘Who’s the Home Secretary?’ ‘Look,’ blustered Stoppard, ‚Äò’I said I was interested, not obsessed.’"

A mark of sanity. And that makes me … ?

Another less appealing aspect:

Americans represent 5 percent of the world’s population but contribute 45 percent of the world’s emission of carbon dioxide, the main pollutant that causes global warming, according to a report by the nonprofit group Environmental Defense.

Buenos Aires, 7 pm.