Ross Douthat is mostly right that the TSA's new procedures would have played somewhat differently on the left had they been put in place during the Bush administration:
In other words, millions of liberals can live with indefinite detention for accused terrorists and intimate body scans for everyone else, so long as a Democrat is overseeing them. And millions of conservatives find wartime security measures vastly more frightening when they're pushed by Janet “Big Sis” Napolitano (as the Drudge Report calls her) rather than a Republican like Tom Ridge.
This downplays significant differences -- namely that conservatives still don't find torture or targeted killing very disturbing, and outside the Democratic Party apparatus, the same civil-liberties groups and figures are still opposing the Obama administration's disappointing continuity with their predecessors. The new procedures didn't suddenly cross a constitutional line; it's just that the extraordinary measures being taken suddenly affected conservatives and not merely those individuals previously deemed deserving of losing their freedom.
That said, the absence of any real political opposition from Democrats to the ongoing expansion of executive power contradicts Douthat's conclusion, that someone will always be there to say "enough." It's not as though Republicans are suddenly reconsidering the power of the surveillance state. That's the big problem -- neither side is saying "enough," anymore, not unless there's a political advantage to be gained from doing so.
