Bush Signs Tyranny Act This Morning, and an Age of Unreason Sets In

The news is out: now that the Mark Foley scandal has retreated enough to let a bit of political theater shine out, George W. Bush is set to sign H.R. 6166 / S. 3930, what is officially titled the Military Commissions Act but what I prefer to call the Tyranny Act instead. By 10:00 AM this morning, an undemocratic executive committees will be empowered to designate citizens and noncitizens alike as enemy combatants without standards for proof and without possibility of review. Hearsay evidence will be permitted to convict an accused person. The right to a speedy trial will be nullified and replaced by a jury with military officers. Court proceedings to be classified. Indefinite detention without the right to review or challenge will be the law of the land.

Consider what this law intends for America when it suspends habeas corpus, the right for an accused individual to challenge the justice of his or her imprisonment. When that right is taken away, the right to ask a question is taken away. The right to have a government judge consider whether the government itself acted reasonably is removed. The intercession of reason in the detainment process is outlawed. Why would any government want to outlaw the intercession of reason in a detainment process? Why would any government want to outlaw the questioning of authority? The only answer I can think of is that the government is fully aware of its own unreasonable detention practices, and that the government knows it cannot reasonably answer the questions that would be put to it, were habeas corpus rights kept intact. An age of unreason, indiscriminate unreason, is setting in.

The fate of this law is now, at least in formal terms, out of our hands. Unless our president is delayed by an irritable bowel, the Tyrrany Act will be in effect in under an hour. We can hope that perhaps in a year or two the Supreme Court might take up the law, review it, and declare it to be no longer in effect. We can hope this, although that hope is significantly dimmed by the appointment of the authoritarian Samuel Alito and John Roberts to the Supreme Court. These appointments were set in motion by the 51% of American voters who in 2004 returned George W. Bush to office, and by the Democratic Party politicians who just couldn’t bother themselves last year to use their procedural power to stop the process. Those same Democratic Party politicians are the ones who couldn’t bother themselves this year to block the new law. While tyrrany’s advocates in government grind on, the Democratic Party leadership shuffles and mutters.

If we are to rescue America in the long term, we will have to search for and shine the spotlight on those few political candidates who actually do support and defend the Constitution of the United States. We will have to support these candidates with our dollars and our votes. We will have to keep talking, every day, about the importance of civil liberty and the rule of law. We will have to exercise our rights of assembly and speech on a regular basis. We will have to engage in creative protest as well. We’re the little people, you and I, but we will just have to do what we can. We will just have to do what we can, because we are on a precipice right now in America. One clever terrorist’s bomb in a public square, one more law, one more Supreme Court appointment, and the plug on the comatose Bill of Rights will be pulled. Before it’s too late, we will just have to do what we can.