Kevin Drum quotes Marshall Wittman (a.k.a. The Bull Moose) on the Hamdan decision:
Analysis that suggests [the Hamdan decision] is a political setback for the GOP has it exactly wrong. Republicans would like nothing better than a pre-election debate over whether Osama's buddies should receive ACLU approved rights.
Drum says he fears Wittman may be right.
Perhaps that's true, although people are always saying how everything will be good for the Republicans, when, looking at the poll numbers, that is just patently untrue. Nobody likes this war and nobody likes this president. So the whole "it'll be good for the Republicans" is just a boogeyman to scare Democrats off from doing the right thing.
Personally, I don't give a damn if it
does turn out to be good for the Republicans. The court's decision is not about politics, it is about our values. It is about the judgment of the world and the judgment of history. Americans, I know, are not supposed to care about what the world thinks of us, but even George Bush cares about what history thinks. He believes history will vindicate him.
I don't believe history ever vindicates people who promote torture and secrecy. History vindicates those who stand against such things, even when they are called traitors. It's not that I believe that I, personally, will be vindicated by history. I'm not an important enough player in any drama for history to care at all about what I did. But what each of us do, personally, does add up to something as a whole -- a sense of protest. Because of what each of us does, minor as it might be, to protest what is being done in our names today, historians will be able to tell a story about the opposition. We were Opposed.
But that's getting off the topic of the Hamdan decision. Like the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage, it was, morally and legally, the right decision.
A few months back, a blogging friend wrote me asking what I thought about Impeachment. He was against the attempt to impeach. I wrote him back that
it is important that some people be speaking clearly about the need for it, whatever the hopes we have that it will happen (so that, at the very least, when Bush is tried at the Hague, those asking where were the americans who objected will know where we were: loudly and vociferously trying to get the criminals out of office by every means possible excepting actual armed insurrection.)
There's also something about the "it'll be good for the Republicans" schtick, especially when it comes from Democrats, that smacks of laziness and cowardice. In the same letter I wrote:
I understand that it's horrible and disgusting to look at the state of the country and know that we actually have to do something about it. I don't claim to be more effective at doing anything about it than you are. I am also quite busy sitting on my ass. But at least let us not convince ourselves that we are justified in doing so. We suffer from a failure of courage and energy, is all. That's normal. Let's not also suffer from a failure of vision. I am calling you to account because I hope and expect you to do the same thing for me. It is not easy being a citizen of this country, these days. But at least let us see.
This is why I blog, minor and ineffectual and erratic though my blogging might be: because when I blog I have to see.
The schtick is an excuse not to pay attention, and, if we see at all, not to act. "Don't give them ammunition to call us crazy traitors." As if they need any. As if they don't invent it out of thin air, out of purple hearts and distinguished public service careers.
Let us now praise the Supreme Court, at least, five members of it, who stood up for the rule of law. The short-term political consequences of such a ruling, and its practical significance, are not relevant.
Atrios notes that Congress is in the Administration's pocket right now anyway -- they'll just make the laws the Administration wants. But then, that's not what the Administration wants, or they'd have done it before. They want not to have to care about Congress. They want the irrelevance of Congress. If Congress must make the law that allows them to behave as they like, then Congress -- a different Congress -- may also repeal that law. The Congress giveth, and the Congress taketh away, and as far as George Bush is concerned, that is completely unacceptable. Someone -- I don't remember which blogger said it -- wrote that what the Court has done is enforce democracy. Democracy, in its current dysfunctional form, may fail us, of course. It probably will. But it is better to have democracy and fail than to give up on it entirely. We are not yet a dictatorship. And there is hope that we may yet prevent one.
Even if, as Atrios says, the Administration ignores the Court and does what it wants anyway, the Court's decision will stand there, a reproach. A message to the future, that we saw what was happening, that we did our best.
Now, it's off to pukes-ville for me.
