Back to Basics.

There is a vote going on today to re-establish the habeus Corpus laws that Bush's Military Commissions Act did away with last year. Don't think it's important?

Listen to what Glenn Greenwald has to say:

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 is, without question, the single worst law enacted during the Bush presidency, and is one of the most destructive laws passed in the last several decades. It is not merely a bad law. It vests in the President the power to detain people indefinitely with no meaningful opportunity to contest the government's accusations. That is the very power the Founders sought first and foremost to prohibit.

More significantly, whether a country permits its political leaders to imprison people arbitrarily and with no process is one of the few defining attributes dividing free and civilized countries from lawless tyrannies. Or, as Thomas Jefferson put it in his 1789 letter to Thomas Paine: "I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution." To vest the President with the power to imprison people indefinitely with no charges is fundamentally to transform the type of country we are.

Greenwald goes on to say:

But none of that even matters. The right to be free of arbitrary executive imprisonment is -- and, since the founding of America, always has been -- a defining and distinguishing attribute of our country (notwithstanding shameful instances in our past where that right has been denied). All citizens -- including, actually especially, those sent to represent the people in Congress -- have an obligation to protect that right from government officials who seek to abolish it.

Christie (Redhead) over at Firedoglake is helping provide phone numbers to key Congressional People so that our Democratic Lawmakers understand just how important this is.....