Andrew Napolitano Gets Down To Basics.

Andrew Napolitano is a former judge on the New Jersey Supreme Court who has his own Fox News show and generally offers the standard over the top fare that has come to be associated with Fox "coverage." But today in the LA Times, he offers a very good defense of the decision to try terrorists in civilian courts, with this (mostly) excellent conclusion:

Think about it: If the president could declare war on any person or entity or group simply by calling his pursuit of them a "war," there would be no limit to the government's ability to use the tools of war to achieve its ends. We have a "war" on drugs; can drug dealers be tried before military tribunals? We have a "war" on the Mafia; can mobsters be sent to Gitmo and tried there? The Obama administration has arguably declared "war" on Fox News. Are Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and I and my other colleagues in danger of losing our constitutional rights to a government hostile to our opinion?

I've sat in the offices of ACLU lawyers who have made the same exact argument about government using declarations of "war" to avoid constitutional requirements regarding due process. What Napolitano does here is something other conservatives seem incapable of: imagining these instruments of war being directly applied to himself, rather than the scary brown people used to justify their use.

-- A. Serwer