Congress must take swift action to rein in White House

In an editorial today, the NYT comes up with a really depressing catalog, that the knee jerk, dead-ender White House loyalists are calling a "terrorist wish list," of just how thoroughly the Bush administration and its former rubberstamp Congress has managed to steadily and stealthily destroy our civil liberties and the very principles of democracy that used to define our country.

The Time's big three form the base for all the other abuses of power and should be immediately addressed by the new Congress. Restoring habeas corpus, bringing domestic surveillance back under the rule of law by requiring warrants for eavesdropping of any sort and banning torture and preventing the use of evidence obtained as the fruit of that poison tree in the courts. The editorial goes on to list several related pratices such as closing the secret CIA prisons and making an account of the inmates who have been disappeared into them and also clamping down on the use of state's secrets in avoiding judicial oversight of their illegal practices.

There's more, but sadly as the Times notes, it is far from a comprehensive accounting. I would certainly add rescinding the Patriot Act to the priority list. That monstrous abridgement of civil rights should never been passed in such haste in the first place and it certainly shouldn't have been reauthorized without much greater scrutiny than it endured. It's not being used to fight terrorists in the first place and as we discover on a regular basis, contains provisions that have nothing at all to do with terrorism but rather merely facilitates the White House's ability to abridge our centuries old rights and operate in extreme secrecy in direct contravention of the Constitution.