Following the last Supreme Court ruling on this topic, which also struck down stubborn Administration detainee policies, the Senator (a Vietnam torture victim himself) invested no small amount of his own treasured (and well-earned) historical capital to try to broker a deal on the detainees.The highlighted passage above shows why McCain reacted as he did. But McCain's reaction is part of a larger problem with the federal government in general.
And, in late 2006, he did.
It’s called the Military Commissions Act. It was a terrible idea from the very beginning, and it was one of two federal statutes undercut by the Justices last Thursday. It’s no wonder the nominee is taking the defeat personally.
After first insisting that federal law clearly and unambiguously outlaw “torture,” McCain suddenly caved to White House pressure on the MCA, allowing the Administration to insert into the law a clause that effectively allows (and, indeed, legally buttresses the efforts of) the executive branch to implement torture as a means of interrogation.
Without McCain’s pander, there would have been no bad law for the Court to strike down last week. Without McCain’s grandiloquent appeal to Democrats and moderates during that lame-duck session, there quite possibly might have been a better law that just might have passed its constitutional test this term.
McCain’s sell-out on the torture language is not the reason the Justices declared the MCA unconstitutional. It is not the reason why the detainees now have more access to federal courts than they did before. But it is emblematic of the larger and much more destructive, seven-year-long sell-out of the legislative branch in the legal fight against terrorism.
And that emblem, thanks to the Supreme Court, now has John McCain’s face on it just in time for the run-up to the general election.
This is not necessarily fair. It’s not just John McCain who failed or refused to do the right thing. Last week’s ruling was the fourth defeat in a row for the Administration at the Supreme Court. And on the past three occasions the Congress has responded not by embracing the hints and clues left by the Court’s majorities - by, say, brokering a desperately-needed deal between executive and judicial branches over a terror law policy - but by siding with the White House.
McCain and other so-called “moderates” have had the power for years to avoid these Supreme Court showdowns and show-ups. They just haven’t had the political courage to exercise that power. [Snip]
The White House is to blame for pushing beyond the legal limits of executive power. And the Congress is to blame for allowing it to happen despite entreaties by the judiciary for help.
The final sentence in the quotation above is the core of the set of massive current problems with the federal government. The Bush administration in its' incompetence is pushing their ideocentric and self-centered agenda far beyond the Rule of Law and the Constitution. But the Congress is supinely going along with the Presidential overreach.
The image of America as the shining example of democracy that came out of the 1776 American Revolution has for the most part been expanded and made even more true in reality until the conservative revolution. Nixon, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton and especially Bush 43 and his handler Cheney have all been working hard to destroy democracy, Constitutionalism, The Rule of Law and individual Liberty in America. But it hasn't just been the Presidents. The Congress has been as guilty for going along as well as the corporate TV media for not reporting the occasional rare objections.
McCain has been in Congress for three decades. He caved on his objections to torture in order to pass the MCA, and now the Supreme Court, even packed with conservatives, has said that his sacrifice of his honor (to further his ambition to become President?) was in a bad cause.
It is no surprise that McCain would react angrily to the Boumediene ruling.
[H/T to Digby.]
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