At the time I am writing this, Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court has been in contempt of a federal court for half an hour. As of 12:00am he carried his battle against the Establishment Clause to a new level, as he officially stood in defiance of a federal court order to remove his two-ton Ten Commandments monument from the rotunda of the Alabama Supreme Court. In the process, he has created a national media circus; he has become yet another embarassment for Alabama in the Yankee press; and his actions may end up costing the State Treasury at the tune of some $5,000 / day if U.S. District Court Judge Myron Thompson makes good on the fine that he says he has been mulling over. But, as someone who’s spent the majority of my life in Alabama, right now I can feel nothing but excitement as Moore makes his lawless stand.

Why is that, you ask? Well, for those who have not followed Moore over the past decade or so of his career, he has made a long career of confrontational theocratic politics, from the original battle over his display of the Ten Commandments and other conduct in his Etowah County Circuit Court, to his ascent to the position of Chief Justice, to his use of the position to issue virulently homophobic tirades masquerading as case law. He is, at best, a dangerous zealot who is willing to use the State’s power of the sword to further his own ends. At worst, he is a demagogue and a charlatan blasphemously using a confrontational form of fundamentalist Christianity to pull media stunts for his own political and financial advancement. My own suspicion is that he is both–that he honestly believes in a version of fundamentalist Christianity that is actually much closer to a form of Gnosticism, a modern-day Right-wing revivalism that legitimates the use of such confrontational tactics and phony martyrdom.

Whatever his real motivations are, his presence on the Supreme Court bench in the state of Alabama has been a terrible liability for the state, and the more blatantly lawless he becomes, the worse it gets. The reason I am so excited is that Moore has gone too far out on thin ice. Tomorrow, the Southern Poverty Law Center will file a motion for him to be found in contempt of court, and if we are lucky, it will land his sorry ass in jail. More to the point, however, the SPLC is also initiating an ethics complaint against Moore, since his defiance of a federal court order is in obvious violation of several sections of the Canon of Judicial Ethics of the Code of Alabama. Moore’s latest exercise in demagoguery has given our state a wonderful opportunity–that is, it has made it quite likely that he will be thrown out of the Supreme Court within a matter of weeks.

Those of you who know me know that I don’t very much like petty vengeance in politics. I don’t usually delight in the misfortunes of people that I disagree with, even politicians that I loathe. It doesn’t fill me with glee to see Roy Moore act in defiance of the Constitution and the federal courts, or to know that it may well result in trouble for him. What makes me happy, and excited, is the prospect of a threat removed–I’m glad that very soon Moore may no longer pose a threat to the judicial system of Alabama.

(N.B.: Watch this space for more on the morrow. I have some more to say about Moore, as well as the local and national media coverage of the fracas. But it can wait; tonight I just want to celebrate the very real possibility of Moore’s impending fall.)

The Bush Administration: Guarding your freedom and security.

Since Tuesday,the Bush administration has been refusing federal court orders to turn over documents on the interrogation of a United States citizen that the Bush administration is holding as an enemy combatant.

Yaser Esam Hamdi was one of two American Taliban who were taken prisoner by Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan. He is currently locked in a Navy brig in Norfolk, Virginia without charges and without access to counsel during interrogations. Hamdi’s attoney has asked U.S. District Judge Robert G. Doumar to release Hamdi or at least provide him with access to counsel. Judge Doumar ordered the government to give Hamdi unrestricted access to counsel, but his decision was stayed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4^th Circuit and remanded to Doumar, which advised him to hear more facts about the case before making a ruling.

The Ashcroft Department of Justice has taken the position that the federal courts have no authority to review the Executive’s determinations of who is and is not an enemy combatant. Thus, it has simply refused the judge’s order to hand over additional documents pertaining to Hamdi’s case.

I hope I don’t need to point out how dangerous a precedent it would set to allow the administration to unilaterally pick and choose whose civil liberties in wants to protect. But just for the sake of argument, let’s look at what’s happening here.

1. The Department of Justice and Department of Defense have detained three men who have been accused of attacking the United States: John Walker Lindh, Abdullah al-Mujahir (formerly José Padilla), and Hamdi.
2. One — Walker Lindh — was tried in open court according to Constitutional protections of civil liberties. Two — al-Mujahir and Hamdi — continue to rot in military prisons with no charges filed and with no access to counsel. The government has decided that these two will be test cases for their claimed war powers. Somehow it just happened to be the case that the government chose to take it out on the Puerto Rican gang-banger from Chicago and the Saudi Arabian-American, but not the rich white kid from Marin County.
3. The Executive says that Hamdi is an enemy combatant on the basis of a two-page affadavit from a Defense Department adviser which gives a brief outline of Hamdi’s alleged actions and says he’s an enemy combatant.
4. The Executive claims that his designation as an enemy combatant gives them the authority to hold him forever without charges and without access to counsel.
5. The Executive claims that federal courts have no power to review their decisions on this matter, and has refused to respect a court order to supply further documents.

So currently the administration is acting in brach of a court order and asserting its right to unilaterally designate anyone that it wants to to have no civil liberties protections whatsoever in the courts. As if deliberately going for perverse irony, the administration is basing its claims from the doctrine of the separation of powers, as if the Executive’s authority over the conduct of war gave it the right to suspend court proceedings whenever it says there’s war business going on. We’ll also simply note in passing that Congress has not actually declared any war in the first place.

There is a word for a system of government where the Executive arrogates the powers of life and death on the basis of the unilateral say-so – the dictates – of no-one other than itself. The word for that system is dictatorship. What’s scary to me is the complete arrogance with which they are proceeding, as if they feel completely comfortable in telling the courts to go fuck themselves, as if they no longer feel that there’s any point in even pretending to be accountable to the people or to the rule of law.

We have to make them uncomfortable and accountable. If the administration continues to refuse the court’s orders, President Bush should be impeached. There is no room to tolerate these kind of abuses. Regardless of what Bush, Ashcroft, or Rumsfeld intends to do with the powers that they are claiming they have, it should be obvious that it would establish a terrifying and intolerable precedent.

Write a letter to the President demanding that the administration comply with the court orders. Write a letter to your Representative and Senators urging them to call the Bush administration to task. Write a letter or Op-Ed to your local newspaper asking how dare the Bush administration ignore basic civil liberties and the separation of powers. They think they can slip this one by while we aren’t looking, but we have to let them know that we’re not going to take it.

This just in: by the time I had finished writing and posting a story on Judge Michael Conahan’s blatantly unconstitutional injunction forcing Tanya Meyers not to abort her pregnancy without the consent of her ex-boyfriend, Conahan had reversed his ruling and ruled that Stachokus’s lawsuit was to be denied and dismissed [CNN].

Nevertheless, the fact that the suit was filed and that Conahan placed the injunction in the first place is still outrageous and inexcusable. As Meyers told the Philadelphia Inquierer,

The case has become a cause celebre in northeast Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley region, where the abortion debate is as personal as it is intense. Meyer’s private life has suddenly become fodder for TV and radio talk shows, newspaper stories and opinion letters — to her dismay.

They have polls and everything, Meyers said yesterday from her mother’s home in Kingston. On the radio, they ask: Should Tanya be allowed to have an abortion? and Should the father of a child be allowed to stop an abortion? It’s ridiculous… . Everybody’s worried about him. What about me? She said she had lost 12 pounds since she told Stachokus about the pregnancy on July 22.

Indeed. Not has the case thrown Meyers unwillingly into the spotlight for the sake of a abusive bastard of an ex-boyfriend and a grandstanding jackass of a judge, but the delay of over a week will also make the abortion more expensive and medically riskier. Conahan should still face severe repercussions for his irresponsible actions, even though he backed down before higher courts could throw out his baseless injunction. If I were advising Tanya Meyers, I’d suggest that she sue Stachokus for compensation and punitive damages, for the time lost and the additional cost and risk of the later abortion procedure (although if she wants to stay out of further media scrutiny, that’s a perfectly understandable decision).

Thank goodness we won this one in the end, but what a tragedy that an innocent woman was thrown into the middle of the battlefield by Conahan and Stachokus.

The anti-abortion Right has often accused pro-choice court victories of being judicial activism that attempts to legislate from the bench rather than allowing state legislatures to decide the issue. Yet today they are cheering Pennsylvania Judge Michael Conahan for his decision to impose a temporary injunction preventing a pregnant woman from having an abortion without the consent of her ex-boyfriend.

Tanya Meyers was nine weeks pregnant and was scheduled to have an abortion on Tuesday. Her ex-boyfriend, John Stachokus, emotionally abused her, and Meyers filed for a protection-from-abuse order against him after he threatened and harassed her after their breakup. Stachokus claims he will take partial or full custody of the child, and that Meyers is being coerced by her mother into having the abortion. Never mind that Meyers is a 22 year old, fully competant adult woman. Never mind that he hasn’t even promised to take full custody of the child. Stachokus is simply determined to use the court system to continue his abuse and control of Tanya Meyers. Judge Michael Conahan has decided to oblige him.

Stachokus’s claim is obviously bullshit. The Supreme Court specifically stated in its decision in Danforth (1976) that Clearly, since the State cannot regulate or proscribe abortion during the first stage, when the physician and his patient make that decision, the State cannot delegate authority to any particular person, even the spouse, to prevent abortion during that same period. The decision was re-affirmed in Casey (1992) and placed under the prohibitions on laws which impose an undue burden on a woman’s Constitutionally-protected right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. But Judge Conahan nor Stachokus cares about the law. They don’t care about a woman’s moral right to control her own body. All they care about is establishing the dominion of a man over a woman’s uterine walls. With no legal basis whatsoever, Conahan has decided to place a temporary injunction forcing Meyers not to have the abortion she was scheduled to have last Tuesday, and he is hearing briefs on Stachokus’s claims today. Meanwhile, Meyer’s is now ten weeks pregnant, and every day of delay means that the abortion procedure that she eventually undergoes will be costlier, harder to obtain, and medically more risky.

Conahan’s flagrant disregard for the law and women’s rights, and Stachokus’s abusive and dangerous behavior are ridiculous and intolerable. Stachokus should be sued for compensation for the time lost and additional cost of the procedure, and punitive damages for his malicious suit. Conahan should be impeached for his disregard for the law and his irresponsible decision.

(I owe the first link to my friend Mark; the second link to Tom Tomorrow)

So it turns out that Congress doesn’t think that restitution through the civil courts is adequate to deal with malicious attacks on computer systems. Indeed, it wasn’t even harsh enough yet when the USA PATRIOT act classifies hacking, viruses, and other malicious computer damage as terrorist acts subject to its draconian measures. So, to remedy this dreadful situation, they’ve decided to put together the Cyber Security Enhancement Act (CSEA), under which police state powers would be greatly increased in computer crimes, and hackers could be thrown in a federal prison until they die.

Unless, of course, you’re a multibillion dollar entertainment corporation. You see, another bill being considered in Congress which would give recording companies and their representatives legal impunity to hack computers if they have a reasonable basis to believe that piracy is taking place, and to use malicious code to trash a publicly accessible peer-to-peer network on which piracy is occurring.

Oh, but don’t worry: if they wrongly destroy your computer… well, they won’t end up in prison for life. But you can sue them! That is, if the damages were over $250. And if the U.S. Attorney General grants you permission to file the lawsuit.

The hypocrisy and slavish appeasement of economic power is hovering somewhere between merely revolting, and physically nauseating.

Take action!

• Write your Congress-critters urging them to reject Rep. Berman’s proposal, and pointing out the hypocrisy of giving big corporations a blank check on a crime which could send anyone else to prison for life [EFF].