Jose Padilla: What Democrats Should be Asking Supreme Court Nominee John Roberts

Ever missing the obvious opportunity to exploit an unpopular Bush position, Democrats have been strangely reluctant to ask "originalist constructionalist" Roberts where he stands on the original Bill of Rights. The Supreme Court is NEARING A DECISION on the most important case in American history, because a bad decision will change what it means to be an American. Until Bush's war on terror, it was every American's right to be charged with a crime and tried by a civilian jury upon being arrested by the government. Meaning you can't just disappear American citizens, never to be heard from again.

Of course Bush wants us to trust him on who's a terrorist, the same way we trusted him that Saddam had WMD, that he was trying to obtain yellowcake uranium, and a thousand other lies. JOSE PADILLA was disappeared off the streets of Chicago by the feds in 2001 and almost 4 years later still sits in jail, incommunicado, without being charged with a crime, on the word of a president who wants us to trust him on everything. It's a trial balloon to see how sheep-like Americans will become in the face of a few terrorist punks. After all, that kind of power could come in mighty handy when some FBI whistleblower or some holier-than-thou accountant at the next ENRON decides he wants to make waves for his betters.

It's the ultimate arbitrary power: the power to make someone vanish. The Argentine Junta, Salvadoran death squads, and every other dictatorship worth its salt has used it against political opponents. Forget Valerie Plame, this is the strongest argument for the impeachment: Bush's failure to uphold his OATH OF OFFICE, which is "to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." Period, end of oath, all she wrote.