by David Bromwich

A tempting fantasy, in Sanford Levinson's posting, about Senator Lieberman being ideally situated to emerge as a hero of constitutional liberty. What, exactly, in Senator Lieberman's record of the past ten years would suggest an absorbing concern with the integrity of the Constitution? In the present crisis, the steady defenders of American liberty have been Senators Byrd, Feingold, and Leahy; intermittently, but with force and point, Senator Hagel; and almost spasmodically Senators McCain and Specter--their many public declarations of conscience followed by inexplicable retreats. Russ Feingold has a strong letter in The New York Times' Week in Review, here, opposing the revolutionary license the president has claimed: a license that includes the right to extemporize laws of his secret design, and the duty to break existing laws he thinks a danger to national security. The new understanding calls for the president, when exercising his revolutionary powers, to notify his own lawyers and the Office of the Vice President, but not the courts and not the legislature. The use of such innovative powers to create a category of stateless and rightless persons ("enemy combatants") and to justify a policy of general warrants, belongs to a larger anti-constitutional program whose full implications have hardly surfaced in public discussion. Why has the discussion not taken place?