Left and Right unite

The always thought-provoking Glenn Greenwald writes today about the sentencing of Holocaust-denier David Irving to three years in prison in Austria. He makes the really good point and, as usual, he makes it really well, that the negative reaction to this is not a conservative nor liberal one, but rather, that it's an American sentiment that...

...nobody should be imprisoned or prosecuted by the State for expressing an idea, no matter how repugnant the idea might be. That sort of trans-ideological consensus is almost unheard of these days with regard to any issue, and it raises what I think are several extremely interesting and important points.

[...]

We are a nation that lives under the rule of law. No man is above the law, including the President. Presidents do not have the right to engage in conduct which Congress makes it a criminal offense to engage in. To avoid the President seizing the powers of a King, the powers he exercises must always be checked and balanced by the Congress and the courts. In order to ensure that we have a representative government, only the people, through their Congress, make the laws, and everyone, including the President, is required to abide by those laws. We are a nation that is ruled by the people -- our elected officials do not rule over us -- and when we enact restrictions through our Congress on what our Government can do to us as citizens (as we did with FISA), those laws bind all citizens, including our elected officials.

None of those principles is even arguably liberal or conservative in the contemporary, political sense of those words. They are the defining American principles of government which has guided our country since its founding. And the Administration’s radical theory that any matter relating to national security threats "is for the President alone to decide" and that neither Congress nor the courts "can place any limits on the President's determinations" – which even bestows on the President the power to ignore Congressional laws or to wield war powers against American citizens on U.S. soil – could not be any more contrary to all of these core principles.

These are the principles that led Americans, in 1978, to enact a law, in response to decades of abuse of eavsdroping powers by Administrations of both parties, which made it a criminal offense for our government to eavesdrop on Americans without judicial oversight and approval. We collectively decided that we want aggressive eavesdropping against our foreign enemies, and the law we enacted enables aggressive eavesdropping. But we also decided that we trust our government to eavesdrop on Americans only with judicial oversight, not in secret and with no oversight. Through our Congress, that was the law we passed, and with that law, we imposed restrictions on the powers which our government could exercise against us.

George Bush concluded that he has the power to ignore that law – or any other law even remotely relating to national security – which he finds burdensome or undesirable. That is the Administration’s expressly stated theory of the President’s power, and it is what led them not only to violate this law, but to engage in the most un-American act possible of detaining U.S. citizens and imprisoning them indefinitely in a military prison without so much as charging them with a crime or allowing them access to a lawyer.

That conduct, and the theories underlying it, are at least as repulsive to core American political values as imprisoning people for expressing prohibited ideas.