Digby in the comments to this Eschaton post:
Let’s review just this week. The exemption from FOIA and potential for crass cronyism unseen since Boss Tweed in the cynically demagogued Homeland Security Bill, the convicted felon Poindexter’s secret surveillance project TIA and the wiretrap freedom granted by the Rhenquist appointed (and wing-nut Silberman dominated) secret FISA appeals court. Combine this with the ongoing bizarre inconsistency with which we are dealing with the various terrorism cases and the fact that most of this is being approved by the congress and likely to be validated by the courts and we see that we have a serious problem on our hands.
And to think I was stupidly counting on libertarians stepping up to the plate on this issue. But, I’m afraid that in light of the issues Atrios cites, and the obvious hard-on Bush and his cronies have for the serious (to the corporations and GOP idealogues) issue of “Tort Reform,” Reynolds’ solution is flaccid and impotent. How disappointing.
Ignatz discusses civil disobedience:
But one’s approach to civil disobedience — and particularly the avowed violation of an injunction or other specific legal order — does not, I think, require a lawyer to espouse a principle that cuts across ideological lines. The reason is that by engaging in civil disobedience of this sort, one is not invoking a legal right that one’s ideological opponents also have. Instead, civil disobedience of this sort is an act avowedly outside the law. One who does it must go into it, knowing that punishment (by contempt of court or otherwise) is the likely result. Even at the height of the civil rights movement, the Supreme Court upheld punishment of civil rights protesters for violating injunctions that they (correctly, in my view) felt were immoral and indeed unlawful. But that’s the deal: engaging in civil disobedience, in terms of violating an injunction or similar order, can subject you to punishment. And so — having recognized this — the lawyer is (I think) free to step out of the lawyer-shoes into human shoes and say “does it strike me that this cause is just enough, to warrant violating the order?”