Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

December 14, 2007

The Bush administration has embraced a medieval concept of law by abolishing the habeas corpus guarantee, which forbids imprisonment without trial. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has proposed a measure that would refine that crude medieval concept into pure totalitarian tyranny.

Justice Breyer has suggested that Congress should pass ?some special statute involving preventive detention and danger.? This would permit the open-ended imprisonment, without trial, of anyone deemed to be dangerous to the State.

The kind of law Breyer is describing was first passed in September 1793 by the government of Revolutionary France. Called the ?Law of Suspects,? it permitted the wholesale imprisonment of six classes of people deemed enemies of the State. In 1923 a similar law was enacted by the government of Soviet Russia as Article 58 of the Soviet Constitution; that measure permitted the imprisonment, or utter liquidation, of ?socially dangerous persons.?

That's the direction we're headed, unless we reverse course immediately.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.