Collins finally becomes more Constitution friendly

Collins Watch - Few noticed this past week when Sen. Susan Collins signed onto an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act  sponsored by Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) that would explicitly ban the indefinite detention of American citizens and permanent US residents.

It's a laudable provision, albeit one that the Constitution (and the Supreme Court's ruling in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld) should have rendered superfluous. That such an amendment is now being offered speaks volumes about both the country's illiberal drift in the period after September 11, 2001 and the resurgence of respect for due process and other legal norms in recent years.

The decision of Collins, a reputed moderate and pragmatist, to join a group looking to bolster basic legal protection might seem unsurprising. But in the context of her actual record over the last fourteen years, it's actually a flabbergasting development.

That's because the senior senator was very much part of the team that helped undermine those legal protections in the first place: Remaining silent during the Bush years as that administration made torture, domestic spying and yes, indefinite detention, cornerstones of its "security" policy--before then voting to forgive these crimes--Collins was every bit the enabler of the nation's drift toward a Bill of Rights-shredding 'emergency law' framework.