CAN SEAN WILENTZ READ? When last the nation heard from Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz, in November 2000, he was organizing a full-page New York Times advertorial in which various academic and Hollywood celebrities announced their solemn conclusion that Al Gore had just won a “clear constitutional majority of the popular vote.” It was, as widely noted at the time, an elementary school dropout’s sort of civics boner (there being no such thing as a constitutional majority of the popular vote for president), and The Scrapbook suspects that Wilentz will never fully live it down. But it seems he may never learn from his famous mistake, either, for judging by the good professor’s latest New York Times excursion, he still has a basic-level reading comprehension problem when it comes to America’s founding documents–or any other English-language text, for that matter. And Wilentz continues to have trouble restraining himself from rushing into print with his resulting confusion. There it was on the Times op-ed page July 8: “From Justice Scalia, a Chilling Vision of Religion’s Authority in America,” Wilentz’s take on Scalia’s speech to a death penalty symposium at the University of Chicago divinity school in February (subsequently reprinted in the May issue of First Things). At that conference, the jurist very clearly stated that: (1) He disagrees with the papal encyclical Evangelium Vitae and the current Catholic catechism, which are anti-death penalty; (2) If he did think the death penalty was morally tantamount to state-organized murder, Scalia would feel obliged to resign from the bench rather than (a) uphold and enforce capital sentences that offended his conscience but were nevertheless perfectly legal; or (b) use his power as a judge to override such perfectly legal sentences, thus imposing his religious views on a democratic polity that sees things differently; and (3) While democracy’s tendency to “obscure the divine authority behind government” often leads devout citizens to the conclusion that they are entitled to disobey laws they believe morally unjust, Scalia thinks this a grave error. Precisely because democratic government does proceed from assumed divine authority, he argues, its laws may be disputed and amended, but must always be respected. Amazingly enough, Wilentz manages in the space of a single Times op-ed to turn all three of Justice Scalia’s straightforward messages upside-down. According to Wilentz, Scalia’s Chicago speech: (1) promotes a conception of “Catholicism as Papist mind control”; (2) shows “bitterness against democracy” and attempts to “rally the devout against democracy’s errors”; and (3) embraces a belief in the divine roots of democratic political authority that “has had no appreciable place in our constitutional history because the framers rejected it”–which would certainly be news to Thomas Jefferson, who imagined, we seem to recall, that all men had been “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” The Scrapbook can’t quite decide whether Wilentz’s Scalia broadside is dishonest or simply dumb. But we do have a theory about why he’s published it as a solo act, instead of in multi-signatory advertorial form, as with the Gore thing in November 2000. This time around, we figure, even Rosie O’Donnell and Bianca Jagger were smart enough to turn him down. A WINNING STREAK FOR JUSTICE The Bush Justice Department’s post-September 11 detention of terrorism suspects and witnesses has been regularly and roundly decried as unconstitutional in the nation’s newspapers, to say the least. Late last week, though, the administration won not one, not two, not three, but four separate and fairly significant federal judicial decisions in its effort to defend that detention policy. We’re quite sure the nation’s newspapers, having exhaustively argued that John Ashcroft has the law all wrong, will now exhaustively discuss these . . . unexpected developments. Just in case they don’t, however, here’s a brief scoresheet. On Thursday, July 11, Chief Judge Michael Mukasey of the federal Southern District Court in New York issued a 37-page opinion upholding the statutory basis and constitutionality of the government’s detention of illegal immigrants on “material witness” warrants connected with a grand jury terrorism investigation–whether or not they have been charged with a crime. Back in April, another judge serving on the same New York district court, Shira Scheindlin, had ruled the opposite way, and at the time Scheindlin’s decision was widely celebrated on the op-ed pages. Chief Judge Mukasey, however, last week called Scheindlin’s opinion “flawed” and “poorly reasoned.” On Friday, July 12, Chief Judge Harvey Wilkinson of the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, writing for a unanimous three-judge panel, concluded that Federal District Judge Robert Doumar had committed procedural error by ordering that detained Taliban fighter Yaser Hamdi–an American born in Louisiana to Saudi parents–be granted immediate, unsupervised access to a lawyer. Wilkinson and his colleagues reversed that order and instructed the lower court to hold a full hearing on the merits of the question–while remaining attentive to the fact that “Our Constitution’s commitment of the conduct of war to the political branches of American government requires the court’s respect at every step.” Also on Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court stayed New Jersey District Court Judge John Bissell’s celebrated ruling last month that closed-door detention and deportation hearings in terrorism cases are unconstitutional. And in a separate case, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the government’s appeal of a circuit court decision striking down as unconstitutional the federal detention without bail of non-citizens who have been charged with a crime. All in all, not a bad couple of days for the war on terrorism. ROBERT MUELLER’S MUSLIM OUTREACH A few weeks ago this page wondered what masochistic impulse had led FBI director Robert S. Mueller III to address the annual convention of the American Muslim Council. This is a group whose founder, Abdurahman Alamoudi, is a well-known supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah. These days, though, the AMC distances itself from Alamoudi. No wonder. The same day that Mueller spoke, Alamoudi, in attendance at the convention, warned Eli Kintisch, the Washington bureau chief of the Jewish Forward, that it might not be “good for your health” to remain at one of the discussions (a panel session, ironically, on “American Muslims in the Media”). Kintisch took the hint and left. The AMC later apologized and said its former leader wasn’t acting on its behalf. Elsewhere in this issue, Stephen Schwartz chronicles the pervasiveness of Wahhabi threats and intimidation in the American Muslim media. It’s disturbing to see the same spirit alive and well at events graced with the presence of the FBI director. THE SCRAPBOOK GETS RESULTS! “Why is the Bush administration sitting on a long-completed report on China’s military power?” this page asked four weeks ago. Maybe they just needed a friendly nudge from The Scrapbook. Last Friday, the report–described by the AP as a “sobering new assessment”–was finally delivered to Congress. “The People’s Republic of China’s ambitious military modernization casts a cloud over its declared preference for resolving differences over Taiwan through peaceful means,” the Pentagon assessment warns.
