All the talk about waterboarding is all well and good but let's not forget about Mukasey's even more alarming views regarding the president's power to suspend constitutional law in the name of national security. If taken to the extreme, something I don't trust GW NOT to do, the president has the right to suspend the next presidential election until the War on Terror has been won. Think about that for just a second and waterboarding doesn't seem so bad. I think we can all agree that is an unacceptable possibility no matter how unlikely.

Yes, he probably has the power. There are even situations where it would make sense, so someone has to. Not reasonable situations, not likely situations, but at least thinkable ones. Active nuclear war. Active invasion of the US by a hostile power where we're losing. Big astroid strike.

:Shrug: Sort of an ongoing nuclear war, the day after he pulls something like that he'd get impeached.

In this scenario Bush has suspended the constitution and declared himself military dictator pro tem. At that point congress becomes an amateur debating society.

As Mukasey likes to say, we're talking hypotheticals here, aren't we? Well, hypothetically, if the President gets a wild hair and decides to suspend the Constitution there is nothing legal anymore compelling the military to support him, beyond force of habit. There is also nothing preventing, say, the states from seceding. Temporarily, that is.

This is a familiar scenario for the paranoid fringe, left and right. It's always believed by the paranoids that the military would go along with such a thing, and from the little time i've spent with military professionals, I tend to doubt that. Of course, i remember that Chilean friends of mine thought the same thing about THEIR military, before Pinochet.

as a practical matter, in the extreme circumstances of i.e "ongoing nuclear war" or other type of exigency that made impossible the administration of an election, there'd be no need to suspend the constitution in order to postpone an election -- the government would be in such disarray that it probably wouldn't be functioning anyway...

also, short of such an exteme circumstance, the president wouldn't be able to get away with such a move as even suspending The Writ -- see Mr. Lincoln's attempt & Chief Justice Taney's response[probably the only thing he wrote with which I concur}

Melvyl,

You comment about Chili are kind of scarry. Cheers for reminding me of that.