Bob Barr, liberal moonbat

Former Georgia Congressman and current presidential candidate Bob Barr, writing on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal yesterday:

Yet even as Republicans [like John McCain] support and defend the Second Amendment, they ignore the Constitution when it says that only Congress can suspend habeas corpus, and then only in event of an invasion or rebellion.

The latter reference is to Boumediene v. Bush, which McCain called "one of the worst decisions in the history of the country." The former is to D.C. v. Heller, which McCain hailed. Bob Barr's point — and it's a fair one — is that lauding one and decrying the other is inconsistent with a more strictly textual reading of the Constitution.

And if a president says we are "at war," Republicans believe he can ignore laws passed by Congress.

Mr. McCain has endorsed, in action if not rhetoric, the theory of the "unitary executive," which leaves the president unconstrained by Congress or the courts. Republicans like Mr. McCain believe the president as commander in chief of the military can do almost anything, including deny Americans arrested in America protection of the Constitution and access to the courts.

If you didn't know that was a WSJ op-ed authored by Bob Barr, you'd almost swear it was an ACLU press release.