Not in so many words. But reading Jeffrey Toobin’s New Yorker piece on Chief Justice Roberts, I paused after this:
Last year, Roberts dissented from Kennedy’s opinion for a five-to-four Court in Boumediene v. Bush, which held that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 violated the rights of Guantanamo detainees.
And then I thought of this remarkable statement from Dick Cheney’s national security speech on Wednesday:
And when [terrorists] see the American government caught up in arguments about interrogations, or whether foreign terrorists have constitutional rights, they don’t stand back in awe of our legal system and wonder whether they had misjudged us all along. Instead the terrorists see just what they were hoping for – our unity gone, our resolve shaken, our leaders distracted. In short, they see weakness and opportunity.
Among those “caught up in arguments” about constitutional rights are the nine Justices of the Supreme Court. That is, um, their job. What Cheney is saying is that for the Court merely to deliberate, let alone rule, on the matter is a display of national security weakness. Cheney is arguing for a fascist state of affairs in which all discussion, all questioning of executive power, is a threat to supposed “unity” and “resolve.” But Cheney of course reserves for himself the right to dissent from government policy and trash the president. It’s an old story: free speech for me, not for thee.
Some on the left are arguing that Obama has crafted a Bush-lite policy on detainees, that there’s little daylight between the two sides. I don’t agree. The difference between Obama’s and Cheney’s understandings of government could not be clearer. And it is not a clash of two legitimate viewpoints — the media does the public a terrible disservice when it suggests so. Cheney’s arguments rely on illegality and a profoundly un-American concept of national security. He disgraced his country during his time in office, and he remains a disgrace to his country today.
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