>>One way to measure an administration's effective decidering in protecting both the patriotic and the Nazi-sympathizer-like admin critics among us is to gauge how much time the administration spends in genning legislation to retroactively protect themselves from legal liability regarding their own actions. The bar is being set quite high.
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>Chris;
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>Isn’t terrible? We have three branches of government that seemed to act as one. The president does not respect the Judicial or Congressional branches even though they are republican controlled.
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>The president would have one branch – the Bush branch. The will of the people means nothing to our president. Who needs a Constitution when you have an attorney general interpreting the law?


The administration's first proposal for the treatment and trial of suspected terrorists, the one that was struck down by the Supreme Court, was in that spirit to a scary degree. Not only were the internationally accepted rules of the Geneva Convention "reinterpreted" (read: tossed out the window), the only avenues of appeal for a defendant convicted by a military tribunal were through the executive branch. You could appeal to the White House or the Pentagon and that was about it. No appeal to the regular court system, no Congressional oversight, no civilian abritrators. I am not being histrionic when I say it sounded like something from a banana republic. The new Bush proposal, the one rejected yesterday by his own party, was not much different, just tinkering around the margins. These guys really do believe in an omnipotent executive branch. Forget everything we learned in school about checks and balances and separation of powers. We can't be encumbered by those relics of the past in this new war on terror.