U.s. District Judge Audrey Collins in Los Angeles has struck down a portion of the Patriot Act and a post 9/11 White House Exectutive Order. Here are excepts from the AP.
Judge Strikes Down Bush on Terror Group
LOS ANGELES - A federal judge struck down President Bush's authority to designate groups as terrorists, saying his post-Sept. 11 executive order was unconstitutionally vague, according to a ruling released Tuesday.
More below the fold.
Here's the skinny:
The Humanitarian Law Project had challenged Bush's order, which blocked all the assets of groups or individuals he named as "specially designated global terrorists" after the 2001 terrorist attacks.
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The case centered on two groups, the Liberation Tigers, which seeks a separate homeland for the Tamil people in Sri Lanka, and Partiya Karkeran Kurdistan, a political organization representing the interests of Kurds in Turkey.
The ruling directly affects only two groups that have been designated as terrorist organizations by Bush. The cases of hundreds of others are still pending. So, both the plaintiffs' lawyers in this case and the DOJ attorneys have something to spin.
[A] spokesman for the U.S. Department of Justice, said, "We are currently reviewing the decision and we have made no determination what the government's next step will be."
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A White House spokeswoman declined to immediately comment.
Plaintiffs' counsel responded in a more celebratory tone.
"This law gave the president unfettered authority to create blacklists," said David Cole, a lawyer for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Constitutional Rights that represented the group. "It was reminiscent of the McCarthy era."
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"Even in fighting terrorism the president cannot be given a blank check to blacklist anyone he considers a bad guy or a bad group and you can't imply guilt by association," Cole said.
Meanwhile in the Washington Post, Bruce Fein, a Justice Department official in the Reagan years said that Bush may be disinclined to appeal.
"If they take this up on appeal, they risk another repudiation of this omnipotent-presidency theory that they have," Fein said.
This was not the first time that Collins gave Bush and his DOJ a spanking.
In 2004, Collins ruled that portions of the Patriot Act were too vague and, even after Congress amended the act in 2005, she ruled the provisions remained too vague to be understood by a person of average intelligence and were therefore unconstitutional.
A story like this presents a spark of hope that we are not just reliving the 1930s. Then, again, the Supremes will probably have their chance to undo this decision. The ongoing mystery (or perhaps it's not really) is why we good Americans have not raised our voices against Bush any more than did the good Germans 70 years ago against the Nazis.
There is a provocative piece in Slate by Diane McWhorter, The N-Word: Why shouldn't we compare Bush to the Nazis? that I heartily recommend.
McWhorter writes:
Perhaps ... we are in the midst of a little intellectual Prague Spring.
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Of course, that democratic interlude met a swift and terrible end. If the midterm election was a referendum on nothing more than Bush's competence, then the message the Republicans have gotten is: Next time, make it work.
Despite an occasional court victory for democracy, Bush and Co. are still trying to make their own plan and vision "work." The House and Senate Judiciary Committees have their own work cut out for 2007-08. Investigate, educate, and perhaps think and say, "impeach."