Terror Bills and Party Splits -- 10/18/06
Yesterday President Bush signed the terror investigation bill that Congress passed nearly a month ago. According to the Washington Post (Michael A. Fletcher, Bush Signs Terrorism Measure, 10/18/06), here’s what the bill does in a nutshell: “The new law imposes tight limits on defendants' traditional courtroom rights, including restrictions on their ability to examine the evidence against them, to challenge their incarceration and to exclude evidence gained through witness coercion.” That alone is enough to dramatically change the traditional guarantees of procedural justice that the founders put in place to ensure that people could not be jailed and sentenced in the United States on purely political grounds. The Bush administration says it will use the new powers only to prosecute terrorists, but the trouble with altering the fundamental protection of rights is that, once you’ve done it, you can’t control how it will be used in the future. What might be the “unintended consequences” of this law?
Also in the news, but not “news” per se, is an article in the Los Angeles Times (Johanna Neuman, Some See “Pink Purge” in the GOP, 10/18/06) about the internal schism in the Republican Party between social conservatives who want the party to stay strictly to its anti-gay agenda, and the party policy of reaching out to moderate voters, some of whom are gay themselves or favor gay rights. Remember the discussion in Chapter 2 of KTR on the difficulties the Republicans have in holding together a collation that includes those with a substantive position on the role of government in establishing the social order and those with a more procedural position. The tension between the two sides, exacerbated by recent events like the Foley scandal and a new book that claims that the administration had privately mocked the evangelicals whose votes it has come to depend on, is likely to have repercussions in the upcoming election. The GOP is counting on its fabled GOTV (get-out-the-vote) machinery, but if social conservatives stay home in large numbers on Election Day, the Republicans will probably lose control of one or both houses of Congress.