The rule of law is not going to be kind to the Bush administration, nor is the historical review. As various cases appear in courts, judges are going to find over and over again that the Bush administration violated constitutional protections over and over again. The US was a rogue nation under Bush-Cheney. We wait to see if Obama will pull the country back. So far, the indications are that the dictatorial powers seized by Bush-Cheney are proving too tempting to the successors.

If and when these cases find their way to the Supreme Court, we can easily predict a 5-4 decision to throw away our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Justice Anthony Kennedy gets to make that decision all by himself. The other eight votes are already counted. Alito, Roberts, Scalia and Thomas need to be voted down in important cases for the next few decades. Will it happen? Time will tell. For now, Justice Anthony Kennedy calls the shots.

[1] clipped from [2] www.nytimes.com Panel Rules Against Ashcroft in Detention Case Former Attorney General [3] John Ashcroft may face personal liability for the decisions that led to the detention of an American citizen as a material witness after the Sept. 11 attacks, a federal [4] appeals court panel ruled on Friday. In the decision, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, was sharply critical of the Bush administration’s practice of holding people it suspected of terrorism without charges, as material witnesses. “We find this to be repugnant to the Constitution, and a painful reminder of some of the most ignominious chapters of our national history,” said the opinion, written by Judge Milan D. Smith Jr. Unless Mr. Ashcroft appeals the decision, the case will go back to federal district court for further hearings, which could involve extensive investigation of the former administration’s antiterrorism policies. [5]