And like Hentoff, I think credit's due here:
Senator Hillary Clinton's warning to her colleagues and the nation received scant press at the time and has been washed away by Mark Foley's e-mails and North Korea's bursting pride in having joined the nuclear club. Hillary, speaking of the June Supreme Court decision (Hamdan v. Rumsfeld)—which forced Congress to pretend to correct Bush's unconstitutional military commissions at Guantánamo, and his five-year violations of the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of our prisoners anywhere in the world—said of the new military commissions bill, since passed by House and Senate, that "it allows a discredited policy . . . to be largely continued and to be made worse."Although, as Hentoff goes on to point out, the military commissions bill passed without facing a filibuster, this doesn't feel like Clintonian pre-campaign triangulation (she voted against the bill). This feels like historically informed patriotism. Good for Hillary.
Hentoff's article of praise is going onto the Readings list in the sidebar.
1 comment:
I agree. I think that the filibuster, like impeachment hearings or bipartisan investigations, is a legitimate congressional tool that's been made all but impossible to use by actions [do I need to say Republican actions?] of the last ten years.
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