All the president's men

Writing in the Guardian, Sidney Blumenthal offers a good overview of conservatives and the Supreme Court, and says the most extreme among them think their goal, which is nothing less than to to overturn FDR's legacy, is just within their grasp.

Excerpts:

President Nixon attempted to pack the court with two southern segregationists who were rejected by the Senate. His choice for chief justice, Warren Burger, as conservative as he was, disappointed him and he took to calling him "a dumb Swede". At last, he selected William Rehnquist, the farthest-right candidate he could find, a judge who had personally intimidated blacks and Hispanics from voting at polling places and written a memo in favour of segregation. Before his confirmation hearing Nixon instructed him to "be as mean and rough as they said you were....."

Conservative frustration at their inability to remake the country through Republican domination of the supreme court has risen exponentially during O'Connor's ascendance. The Federalist Society, a tightly knit group of conservative lawyers created during the Reagan period, now operates as a controlling network throughout the Bush administration. There is simply not a single presidential appointee in a position of legal responsibility who is not a card-carrying member. Among them, the regnant doctrine is called the "constitution in exile" - a belief that the true constitution has been suppressed since Roosevelt and can be restored by the uniform appointment of "originalists" to the court.....

Indeed, the notion of torture is alive in the executive branch. Bush's lawyers, in the office of legal counsel of the justice department, have concluded that the president "enjoys complete discretion" and any limitation on his power to torture is unconstitutional. Thomas's logic is the same as the logic of the OLC in granting the right of the president to torture as part of his inherent authority as commander in chief. In his dissent in Hamdi v Rumsfeld, Thomas argued thatdetainees have no right to due process of law, assigning "unique" powers to the executive in national security, and none to Congress, contrary to the constitution. The extremity of advocating legalisms for the suspension of rights and torture is not unrelated to a broader extremism.

The spirit animating the Bush administration and the conservatives on the court is the illusion of omnipotence. It is the opposite of that of Justice John Paul Stevens (a Republican appointed by President Ford, who has recently expressed his pride in doing so). In his dissent last year in Rumsfeld v Padilla, Stevens argued that an American citizen could not be detained without due process. "Even more important than the method of selecting the people's rulers and their successors," he wrote, "is the character of the constraints imposed on the executive by the rule of law."