Mark Shea on the bipartisan advance of the national security state in the Age of Terrorism:

So what has the Senate—the check on an overweening Executive—done to rein in a President who regards himself as empowered to kill you if he feels like it?  The Senate wants to give the man claiming this unilateral power of life and death over every American the unilateral power to lock up—forever—any and all Americans on his word alone as well.

What could possibly go wrong? 

Simply this:  the reason institutions like the state exist and why a thousand years of Anglo-American law are there is to protect the citizens, not just from Bad Guys like terrorists, but just as much from the depredations of those with absolute and unquestioned power.  So, while this bill seems to many a neatly efficient way of dealing with the problem of terrorists, it also has the regrettable side effect of giving a small and absolutely unaccountable elite absolute and unaccountable power over every single American citizen while stripping you and me absolutely naked and defenseless before an omipotent Leviathan. Should the Executive decide he wants to say that you and I are terrorists and lock us up forever without hope of appeal, this bill says, “Go for it!” and takes away habeas corpus solely on the basis of his almighty and unquestionable fiat.

“Yeah, so what?” say some supporters of the bill.  “Senator Graham tells it like it is.  We’re at war and desperate times call for desperate measures.  If you don’t want to feel threatened by this tough measure then don’t be a terrorist traitor!”  Yes, well, there is that.  But there is also the little fact that what this bill does is a) place the matter of defining who is a “terrorist traitor” in the hands of an omnipotent executive who could, if he felt like it, declare you a terrorist traitor even when you aren’t one.  Indeed, you don’t even need to be a terrorist traitor.  You just need to be somebody the state thinks is suspicious based on its own bizarre criteria.

Read the whole thing. Clearly, Shea is just dying to be put on an Official List.