The assault on democracy.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Military law

We lost a big chunk of our democracy on September 28, 2006. That was the day the Senate voted, 65 to 34, to approve the Military Commissions Act, assuring that this "flagrantly unconstitutional" bill, as Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont accurately labeled it, would become law.

There can be no denying that we, as a people, are much less free today.

This law skews our system of checks and balances. It eviscerates the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments. And it repudiates the Magna Carta.

It allows the President of the United States to label anyone--including a U.S. citizen--an enemy combatant and to deprive that person of basic due process rights to challenge his or her detention in court. And it authorizes the President "to try alien unlawful enemy combatants" (the bill's terminology) before a military tribunal, with inferior legal safeguards. If convicted of a serious crime in such a kangaroo court, these enemy combatants can then be executed.

This law destroys the writ of habeas corpus, the guarantee that you can challenge your detention in court. Thomas Jefferson once said, "Habeas corpus secures every man here, alien or citizen, against everything which is not law, whatever shape it may assume." But neither alien nor citizen is secure today.

"What this bill will do is take our civilization back 900 years," said Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, who introduced an amendment to preserve habeas corpus. That amendment failed 51-48, and then Specter turned around and voted for the bill.

The act defines an enemy combatant as "a person who has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States" or anyone who "has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant" by a tribunal set up by the President or the Secretary of Defense. This extraordinarily broad definition is not limited to noncitizens.

As the Center for Constitutional Rights has noted, this could mean that even lawyers for detainees at Guantanamo could be designated as enemy combatants since they could be construed as giving "material support" to those engaged in hostilities against the United States.

This law, says Vincent Warren, executive director of the center, gives the President "the privilege of kings."

The law also dilutes Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. The Supreme Court, in the Hamdan decision this past June, said the Executive Branch had to uphold Common Article 3. But this new law says...