E-Mail This Article to a Friend Judge not Saving the filibuster is crucial to preserving judicial independence. Plus, the Abu Ghraib fiasco, and the GOP targets your privacy.

IN A CONSTITUTIONAL republic such as ours, an election does not entitle the winners to fulfill their every wish; nor does it strip the losers of all protections. An independent judiciary balances the will of the majority with the rights of the minority. Now that bedrock principle is under full-scale assault.

Led by right-wing religious zealots who would abolish reproductive choice, halt progress toward same-sex marriage, deny families the right to make difficult end-of-life decisions, and mock science on issues ranging from stem-cell research to the teaching of evolution, the Republican Party is now seeking a complete takeover of the judicial system. (Never mind that the Republicans control 10 of the 13 federal courts of appeal, as well as a majority of the Supreme Court.) Outnumbered Senate Democrats have stopped them from ramming through 10 of President Bush’s most extreme nominees for federal judgeships, while allowing far more — about 200 — to win confirmation. The Republican response: abolish the use of the filibuster in confirming judicial nominees.

Last weekend, leading religious-right figures — joined, shamefully, by Senate majority leader Bill Frist, who’d like to run for president — starred in a 90-minute satellite-television special called Justice Sunday, aimed at pressuring senators into abandoning the filibuster [see "Don’t Quote Me," News and Features, page 16]. Under Senate rules, a vote can be delayed as long as members are speaking on the floor. It takes 60 votes to cut off debate, which is five votes more than the Republicans can command. Frist’s proposed solution: changing the rules so that judicial nominees can’t be filibustered, thus allowing judges to be confirmed by a simple majority. This change — dubbed the "nuclear option" by outraged Democrats — could be accomplished by means of a simple declaration by Vice-President Dick Cheney, the presiding officer of the Senate.

In a closely divided country, with a closely divided Congress, the president must nominate judges who are broadly acceptable across the ideological divide: moderate conservatives and traditional conservatives, not extremists who would overturn Roe v. Wade and take away legal protections for lesbians and gay men. The filibuster is the only means by which he can be pressured to do that. The public would appear to agree. According to the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll, those surveyed oppose the "nuclear option" by a two-to-one margin — including nearly half of all Republicans. It is the religious right and its allies on the extreme right of the Republican Party who are out of touch. Democrats and principled Republicans must stand firm.

The right-wing Family Research Council is urging its supporters to contact senators who are thought to be on the fence about whether to embrace the "nuclear option"; the progressive community can do the same. For a list of these senators and their phone numbers, go to https://www.frc.org/frcaction/index.cfm?get=senators. For more information on what you can do, visit the MoveOn.org Political Action Committee at http://www.moveonpac.org.

DESPITE VOLUMINOUS evidence that torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was systemic and extended to American-run detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay and in Afghanistan, the US government last week announced that none of the top military commanders in Iraq would be held accountable. An internal investigation cleared Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez and three other top officers. Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of the prison, will be reprimanded. Other than the scapegoating of Karpinski, though, the only people held responsible for the outrageous treatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib — the sexual humiliation, the dogs, even credible charges of homicide — are the low-ranking soldiers who actually ran the prison on a day-to-day basis.

Human Rights Watch, which is not known for making wild accusations, has called for a special prosecutor to investigate Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former CIA director George Tenet, Sanchez, and Major General Geoffrey Miller, the former commander of the Guantánamo prison camp, to determine whether they should be held criminally responsible for the illegal abuse of prisoners. As a reminder of how deeply compromised the Bush administration is, Human Rights Watch notes that a special prosecutor is needed because the person who would normally head such an inquiry — Attorney General Alberto Gonzales — is himself complicit by virtue of his responsibility for the policies under which torture took place.

"A year after Abu Ghraib, the United States continues to do what dictatorships and banana republics do the world over when their abuses are discovered — cover up the scandal and shift blame downwards," said Human Rights Watch special counsel Reed Brody in a statement. "A wall of immunity surrounds the architects of the policy that led to all these crimes."

The Abu Ghraib horror stands as a powerful metaphor for the Bush administration’s failed war in Iraq. Nearly three months after elections in that country created some cause for optimism, Iraqis are still unable to form a government, and terrorist attacks continue on a daily basis. The war continues to strain the US economy and undermine our standing in the world. And Abu Ghraib, in particular, is a symbol of the mistakes (and much worse) that have made us an object of hatred in much of the Arab and Muslim world.

On Tuesday, May 3, at 6:30 p.m., the Ford Hall Forum will present a free program at Faneuil Hall on "Torture and Detention: Is This the American Way?" For more information, go to http://www.fordhallforum.neu.edu. The program will be preceded at 4:30 p.m. by a protest vigil organized by Amnesty International. To read the Human Rights Watch report "Getting Away with Torture? Command Responsibility for the US Abuse of Detainees," go to http://www.humanrightswatch.org.

SINCE 9/11, the Republicans have invoked the specter of terrorism to foist upon the public a host of harmful policies, from the USA Patriot Act to the war in Iraq. (And now that the election is long since over, whatever happened to those color-coded terrorism alerts?) Now comes something called the "Real ID Card," a bill that would require states to adhere to strict federal standards when issuing driver’s licenses. Critics on both the left and the right argue that the bill, if it becomes law, would create what would amount to a national identification card, long feared as an invasion of privacy.

Although driver’s licenses would ostensibly remain state documents, they would, in reality, amount to federal driver’s licenses, and could become the only acceptable form of identification across the country [see "License To Spy," News and Features, April 22]. As Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, warns, "Historically, governments use national ID systems to control populations rather than protect them.... The phrase ‘Your papers, please’ is antithetical to traditional American values of privacy and freedom to travel."

Fortunately, liberal groups such as the ACLU have been joined by conservative organizations, including the American Conservative Union and the Liberty Coalition, in opposing the "Real ID" bill. But the chief proponent, Wisconsin congressman James Sensenbrenner, is a powerful Republican accustomed to getting his way. Moreover, he has the backing of the Bush administration, whose Department of Homeland Security would gain power if the bill were to pass.

It appears unlikely that this ill-conceived legislation could win approval on its own merits. But the House has attached it to an appropriations measure that would fund the war effort as well as relief for victims of the tsunami. The ACLU has called upon the House-Senate conference committee dealing with the bill to remove the "Real ID" measure before sending it on for a final vote.

If enough members of the libertarian, pro-privacy wing of the Republican Party speak out, this outrageous assault on our civil liberties may yet be headed off. Nevertheless, it is disheartening to see our basic freedoms under continual assault from elected officials who ought to know better.

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