A federal appeals court judge granted the government a stay against a federal judge’s ruling permanently enjoining a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which passed last year and granted the military the legal authority to indefinitely detain persons. Lawyers from the Justice Department under Obama argued they needed an emergency stay because the injunction appears to be “worldwide in its effect, intruding upon military operations in the ongoing armed conflict against al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces.”

In a District Court ruling last week, the judiciary proved once agai, how impotent and subservient to unchecked executive power it is when a federal court judge invoked the state secrets privilege and dismissed most of a suit against Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents, who infiltrated and spied on mosques in Orange County in California. The ruling essentially gave cover to the FBI, which had lied to the community about engaging in covert operations against the Muslim community. And yet the foundation of the state secrets doctrine is based on government fraud.

Edward Teller attends Democratic and Tea Party caucuses in Wasilla, Alaska and asks a few simple questions of members of each group. He asks how people feel about actual policies or actions taken by the US government. The findings may surprise you.

I have become the exemplar of Obama Derangement Syndrome with a Friday post about the White House starting a mini-war in Africa. It was front-paged on Saturday and caused a bit of debate. So let me make some additional remarks.

Just a few years ago, the national debate over the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, indefinite detention, secret renditions and other legal elements of the Bush Administration’s “War on Terror” happened openly in American courtrooms and in the daily newspapers. Increasingly, those debates have receded into the rearview mirror as we content ourselves with the illusion that these issues are no longer urgent, or no longer affect us. In his thoughtful new book, Habeas Corpus After 9/11, Professor Jonathan Hafetz of Seton Hall University School of Law, reminds us that these and other legal innovations in the War on Terror are neither resolved, nor isolated, nor benign. We are still living in the legal universe that was constructed on the fly after 9/11. We just don’t want to admit it.

David Brooks is disgusted at the Tea-GOP Zombies. In another bridge-burning column, he calls out the Tea-GOP Zombies for being not only ideological zealots “unable to accept compromise,” but also anti-intellectual morons having “no sense of moral decency.”

But before you cheer Brooks’ acknowledgement of what the rest of the planet realized long ago, consider what it is Brooks believes is morally indefensible versus what is reasonable and wise.

The President signed the 2011 appropriations bill yesterday, and he attached a signing statement to it. There were two bones of contention. The first was the measure banning funds to transfer prisoners from Guantanamo. The second, the bill defunded the offices of Presidential advisors, or “czars,” four all ready vacant or defunct.

It was naive of anyone to think that any executive branch would willingly give up their own power. Congress, thanks to Republican doddering, made the effort to put the slightest of brakes on that power temporarily. But they were promptly told that they endangered America, so that will be that.

Jasmine Farrier’s Congressional Ambivalence tackles a subject that is both classic and timely: delegation of policy choices to the President and the executive branch. Farrier analyzes delegation to the executive on military base closures, trade policy (“fast track”), and the “War on Terror”—the PATRIOT ACT, Iraq policy, Guantanamo, and surveillance wiretaps. She finds a recurring theme of ambivalence: expressions of reluctance before Congress cedes power, expressions of regret after the fact. But Farrier suggests that Congress nonetheless rarely reclaims power once it has been ceded to the executive, a point illustrated perfectly by the PATRIOT act.

There’s no doubting the conservative bona fides of Bruce Fein. A high-level Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration in the 1980s and previously a resident scholar with the Heritage Foundation, he is a long-time advocate for uncompromising right-wing political principles.