Senator John McSame (R-Fearmonger) conducted another sham Town Hall meeting today and used the occasion to raise the Fear Flag as his standard for the 2008 election. Just as Bush utilized for the 2002, 2004 and 2008 elections, McSame has decided that the only way Americans can be properly informed is to be quaking in fear at the thought that some terrorists exist who really, really want to hurt Americans and kill us deader than dead.

Key to his strategy is to attack yesterday’s Supreme Court decision as “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”

That’s what I thought in December 2000 when a similar Court elected Bush as president and the only difference now is two extremist conservatives have been added to the court, replacing Rehnquist (conservative) and O’Connor (moderate conservative). Shifting it more rightward has obviously not helped appease McSame’s desire to make it a rubber stamp for an activist Presidency that has continually tried to expand Executive Branch powers beyond the limits set by the Constitution.

From McSame’s statement:

“… we made it very clear that these are enemy combatants, these are people who are not citizens, they do not and never have been given the rights that citizens of this country have. And my friends there are some bad people down there. There are some bad people. So now what are we going to do. We are now going to have the courts flooded with so-called, quote, Habeas Corpus suits against the government, whether it be about the diet, whether it be about the reading material. And we are going to be bollixed up in a way that is terribly unfortunate, because we need to go ahead and adjudicate these cases. By the way, 30 of the people who have already been released from Guantanamo Bay have already tried to attack America again, one of them just a couple weeks ago, a suicide bomber in Iraq. Our first obligation is the safety and security of this nation, and the men and women who defend it. This decision will harm our ability to do that.

Of course, habeas corpus lawsuits have nothing to do with diets and reading material and a host of other issues, so he’s completely off-base. What such filings achieve is the basic right that requires the government to demonstrate that they have sufficient evidence to conclude that somebody they’ve imprisoned actually has done something that represents a threat to our country. If the government doesn’t have enough evidence to convince a judge that they should be locked up, the judge can order the prisoner to be set free.

Imagine the danger that’s posed by the need for some evidence. Why, this clearly prevents our government from ordering people to be locked up because they look kinda suspicious or because somebody turned them in to obtain a bounty payment without any proof that they actually did anything wrong at all. Horrors!

The Bush administration has insisted that the president alone gets to define someone as a terrorist and lock them up for years because only the president is smart enough to judge this stuff. Anyone who challenges that notion has to be a terrorist, a liberal or a Dixie Chick and will face imprisonment, slander, libel and death threats. And it should be obvious the president has kept us safe by preventing Cat Stevens from visiting America and preventing Ted Kennedy from getting on a plane to fly anywhere.

For a more enlightened explanation of what the Supreme Court decision actually did, review what the expert Constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald wrote. Per his conclusion:

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court, in what will be one of the most celebrated landmark rulings of this generation, re-instated that basic right, and in so doing, restored one of the most critical safeguards against the very tyranny this country was founded to prevent.

A post from non-lawyer Hilzoy provides an explanation anyone can understand:

Or, in short: if we accept the government’s argument, we would concede that it can legally do what it has tried to do in fact: to create a legal black hole in which it can act outside the law and the Constitution. We cannot do that.

This is, to my mind, the most important holding in the opinion. It defends the separation of powers against an attempt by the Executive to free itself from the constraint of law. That is immensely important.

So ultimately, the Supreme Court majority, 3 appointed by Republicans and 2 appointed by a Democrat, said the right of habeas corpus is possibly the greatest right our founding fathers granted, even before the addition of the Bill of Rights. It’s the essence of our entire democracy, that people cannot be imprisoned at the whim of a ruler, but can only be imprisoned if some evidence of guilt exists.

It is that right - which was first established in Great Britain’s Magna Carta - that provides us our greatest freedom from government tyrants. That’s hardly a new concept. The only groundbreaking done by this decision is that the Court decided all people possess that right when facing imprisonment in a US cell. The Bush administration claimed that only US citizens have that right and claimed that people they put in prisons not on US soil have no rights at all.

McSame is claiming terrorists should have no rights but he ignores the obvious: hundreds of people who were imprisoned for several years ultimately got released because our government decided they were guilty of nothing and posed no threat to our country. So innocent people should have no rights? No right to see evidence? No right to have a lawyer?

According to McSame, that’s how it should be. Which means the President should be able to lock innocent people up for years without any way to challenge the president’s decision.

The Constitution awarded the right to make that kind of judgment to the Judiciary and only allowed the President the ability to suspend that right in emergency situations. The Court noted that and did not try to impose a specific time length that a president can claim an emergency exists. But it did indicate that seven years after the 9-11 attacks and five years after the president started the war in Iraq were too long - considering all the facts about this particular ongoing set of wars. There is no insurrection. There has been no invasion of our country by foreign enemies to any degree that warrants such a long claim of emergency powers.

The Supreme Court has to weigh what the Constitution says and the intent of its authors to deliver an authoritative interpretation. It did so yesterday. It fulfilled its Constitutional responsibility. Opponents to the ruling will grouse about ‘judicial activism, but the court can only rule on matters others bring to it.

In this case, it was an activist Executive branch that set a new precedent. The reactive Judicial Branch intervened and said that activist Executive Branch (and a supporting Legislative Branch) acted outside the bounds of the Constitution and its authors’ intents.

Senator McSame attacks it because he wants to wield unlimited power, just as Bush has tried to do. And if he can convince enough Americans to give up the security of their own freedoms for a false sense of safety from a few bad guys, maybe he can win.

Be scared! It’s the McSame slogan and strategy. It worked so well for Bush, didn’t it?

Now be sure to enter the contest to define the other really, really, really bad Supreme Court decisions in John McSame’s mind.

And ponder this a bit: as McCain attacked the decision, he noted: “By the way, 30 of the people who have already been released from Guantanamo Bay have already tried to attack America again, one of them just a couple weeks ago, a suicide bomber in Iraq.”

Those releases occurred before the Supreme Court decision, under Bush’s sole authority. It sure doesn’t sound like Bush has the proven judgment to make these decisions well. And of course, if you imprison hundreds of innocents wrongfully for several years, it increases the odds that some will become new enemies. I mean, if it happened to you, wouldn’t you go away angry and seeking revenge, too?

The balance of powers is not just a necessary part of our government, but it can provide better solutions than any one person can do. And in this instance, time will demonstrate what a good decision this was.