What are they trying to avoid? We know that they rounded up hundreds of people and then handed them over for treatment that ranged from the equivalent of harsh college hazings up to major beatdowns and torture. But when you do that to people from places like Afghanistan who have never had a stress test, who have bad hearts from rheumatic fever or early type 2 diabetes, a fair number of them are going to drop dead. Plus some were just brutally beaten to death. Probably dozens of people died under interrogation (or to put it less delicately, they were tortured to death), and the Bush adminsitration is desperately looking for it to be made legal retroactively.

So they are going to use 9/11 to push for a vote before the election. The voters need to be reminded that this is how Rove rammed through the vote on Iraq  right before the 2002 elections. Democrats rolled over and they still LOST in the elections. Remember that lesson.

Remember how that played out? Congress passed these and they turned out to be garbled messes:

October 2, 2002 Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq

and the

October 16, 2002 Authorization for use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002

Probably an effective way to delay this vote would be to point out that this is exactly how Rove rushed us into Iraq in 2002 on false information.. And that is a good way to make the issue radioactive for GOP candidates - tie it to Iraq, cheney, rove, and their usual bag of tricks.

The good news is that there is hardly any legal scholar willing to say that this strategy would be legal or Constitutional, and this sort of crude political move is not what the Supreme Court had in mind when it told the White House to try to sort things out with Congress following the Hamda decision.

But somebody will need to jump up to make that statement without being invited. This would be the very thing that former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor warned us about. And I think we could count on Jimmy Carter. The course here is obvious, delay the vote until after the election and after hearings, where Constitutional scholars, former Supreme Court justices, military lawyers, and the ACLU should testify. After the election, Bush simply won't have the votes, especially after hearings.  I think that most Dems can say "Gosh golly, this sure is complicated. We'd better ponder this a couple months."

But beware, some legislators will flock to this, either because they are members of criminal conspiracy or because they are being blackmailed (lots of folks took bribes you know). But W's support in the past week has looked very soft, because he will be the lamest of lame ducks by Christmas.

However it plays in DC, it willbe essential to have a swift repsonse. Perhaps some of the most persuasive voices will be the 9/11 survivors who do not want to be exploited in a full blown attack on the Constitution.