Compassionate Authoritarian

Two leading Republican Candidates are willing to arrest YOU (or any U.S. citizen) with NO review. This is where the Republican party has been taking us under Bush. He has laid the ground work and his party will continue down this road. Think Bush was bad, you ain't seen nothing. From Glenn Grennwald Your modern-day Republican Party Various Republican candidates attended a meeting of Club for Growth, and afterwards, National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru spoke to Cato Institute's President Ed Crane about what they said. This brief report from Ponnuru is simply extraordinary: Crane asked if Romney believed the president should have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens with no review. Romney said he would want to hear the pros and cons from smart lawyers before he made up his mind. Mitt Romeny can't say -- at least not until he engages in a careful and solemn debate with a team of "smart lawyers" -- whether, in the United States of America, the President has the power to imprison American citizens without any opportunity for review of any kind. But in today's Republican Party, Romney's openness to this definitively tyrannical power is the moderate position. Ponnuru goes on to note: Crane said that he had asked Giuliani the same question a few weeks ago. The mayor said that he would want to use this authority infrequently. It sounds like Giuliani is positioning himself in this race as the "compassionate authoritarian" -- "Yes, of course I have the power to imprison you without charges or review of any kind, but as President, I commit to you that I intend (no promises) to 'use this authority infrequently.'" Two of the three leading Republican candidates for President either embrace or are open to embracing the idea that the President can imprison Americans without any review, based solely on the unchecked decree of the President. And, of course, that is nothing new, since the current Republican President not only believes he has that power but has exercised it against U.S. citizens and legal residents in the U.S. -- including those arrested not on the "battlefield," but on American soil. More... UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan cites the views on this matter of Winston Churchill -- whom Bush followers love to trot out (manipulatively) as their prop to symbolize endless warfare -- expressed when Churchill was, as Sullivan puts it, "fighting a war against the greatest evil imaginable, when the very survival of Britain as an independent and free country was in the balance": The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him judgement by his peers for an indefinite period, is in the highest degree odious, and is the foundation of all totalitarian governments whether Nazi or Communist. The extent to which the dominant factions of the Republican Party are hostile to our most basic constitutional traditions and defining political principles really cannot be overstated. They simply do not believe in them.