Redstate

Posted at 5:40pm on Jun. 12, 2008 Guantanamo and A Tale of Two Campaigns

Middle vs. Left = Muddle

By Dan McLaughlin

As Chief Justice Roberts pointed out, the core issue in today's detainee decision is the struggle between the power of Congress and the power of the courts: it's not whether the U.S. has the right to detain enemy combatants, and not whether non-U.S. citizen detainees have access to legal process to challenge their detention, but simply whether Congress has a right to define and limit those procedures (as it did by statute in 2005 and 2006), or whether the Supreme Court has absolute authority to require that all procedural rules be determined by the district courts and reviewed by the Supreme Court. For this President and his successor, however, the bottom-line question remains what to do with enemy combatants: continue to hold them at Guantanamo or some similar facility subject to the new procedures, go back to Congress for yet another set of rules, or perhaps ship more detainees off to other countries to handle in their own way.

In a serious world, we'd expect presidential candidates to present competing visions of how to answer both sets of questions. But the responses of the McCain and Obama campaigns to today's decision shows that each is too busy struggling in their own ways with the politics of this issue to address it meaningfully.

Read On...

Posted in 2008 | Barack Obama | Guantanamo | John McCain | Obamafiles | Sigh. I Guess I'm For McCain. — Comments (15)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 8:19pm on Jun. 10, 2008 Tancredo Backs McCain

By Dan McLaughlin

For those of you still suffering heartburn over McCain as the nominee, Tom Tancredo feels your pain, but he's got his priorities in order:

Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., has reluctantly come to the conclusion that he will have to vote for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., whose immigration reform bill Tancredo blasted as amnesty.

Posted in 2008 | John McCain | Sigh. I Guess I'm For McCain. | Tom Tancredo — Comments (8) / Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 7:39pm on Apr. 21, 2008 Kinda Like That "Parallel Public Financing System"

By Dan McLaughlin

The NY Times on the "Millionaires' Amendment" case:

On Tuesday the Supreme Court will hear a legal challenge to the so-called millionaires’ amendment. It should uphold Congress’s modest effort to help candidates who rely on outside contributions to get their messages out to the voters.

Posted in bcra | mccain-feingold | Sigh. I Guess I'm For McCain. | The Courts | The New York Times — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Read More »