Don't stay in bed, unless you can make money in bed. - George Burns

Lettre De Futurama

by Lee

Bruce Fein, Slate, Impeach Cheney

Then President George W. Bush outsourced the lion’s share of his presidency to Vice President Cheney, and Mr. Cheney has made the most of it. Since 9/11, he has proclaimed that all checks and balances and individual liberties are subservient to the president’s commander in chief powers in confronting international terrorism. Let’s review the record of his abuses and excesses: The vice president asserted presidential power to create military commissions, which combine the functions of judge, jury, and prosecutor in the trial of war crimes. The Supreme Court rebuked Cheney in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Mr. Cheney claimed authority to detain American citizens as enemy combatants indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay on the president’s say-so alone, a frightening power indistinguishable from King Louis XVI’s execrated lettres de cachet that occasioned the storming of the Bastille. The Supreme Court repudiated Cheney in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld.  [Emphasis mine]

Me, Lettre de Bush, November 2005

Those of you who saw the film Quills will be familiar with lettre de cachet, as this was the rule under which De Sade was imprisoned.  Essentially anyone could be imprisoned at the pleasure of the king, and there were no mechanisms in place for the prisoner to win his just freedom.  It was an example of the astonishing abuse of executive power.  What the Bush administration has enacted is nothing more than a modern version of the lettre de cachet.  Oh, sure, the men we’re imprisoning were picked up on the battlefield, right?  And they’ve all got scary, Muslim names, so this isn’t anything that your average American Joe needs to be concerned about, is it?

Of the men currently being held in detention, how do we know that they are actually foreign fighters, and not just some poor dumb bastard who happened to be running back to his village to be with his wife and child?  We don’t.  And as it stands right now, there is no mechanism for any of these men to demonstrate that they do not deserve to be imprisoned, indefinitely, without trial.  They are literally being held at the president’s pleasure.  Given that our Founding Fathers fought a war against exactly this type of unrestrained executive power, and subsequently set up a system of careful checks and balances to prevent it from happening in the future, I think it is astonishingly short-sighted to somehow think that investing our Executive branch with the power of lettre de cachet is a prudent thing to do.

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