One good reason for this power imbalance, explains Adam Serwer, is that Republicans feel they’ll win whether or not negotiations break down:

Republicans, meanwhile, have been less accommodating, with some suggesting that they could simply hold off until January, when they will control the House and hold a stronger hand in the Senate. That would set the stage for a more powerful push to permanently extend all the cuts — the preferred GOP alternative.

“They might blame GOP obstructionism. But, you know, people are going to start missing a lot of money in their weekly paychecks in January. And there’s only going to be one person in the White House,” said a Republican House aide, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe party thinking.

In other words, if talks break down and taxes shoot up for everyone, Republicans are banking on Americans blaming the president. If, on the other hand, Republicans get their way and make the cuts permanent for all income earners — racking up nearly an additional trillion dollars of federal debt over the next decade in the process — they’ll be nothing short of ecstatic about that, too.

At the heart of the New Black Panther case was Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act, which offers legal protections against voter intimidation. It had only been used once prior to the Bush administration — in 1992 to prevent a statewide voter suppression effort initiated in South Carolina by then Sen. Jesse Helms. In this case, the Bush administration wanted to use Section 11(b) against several New Black Panthers who had stood in front of a polling place in a black neighborhood, one of whom wielded a baton.

“There was no pattern and practice, no concerted effort to cage thousands of voters like in the [1992] Jesse Helms case.” said Gerry Hebert, a former senior Voting Rights Section attorney who has served under multiple administrations. “That strikes me as the kind of large-scale voter suppression case that would be more appropriate for Justice Department resources to be spent on.”

The Bush administration filed two Section 11(b) cases, both on behalf of white voters, both supervised by Coates: The Black Panther case and a separate case in Noxubee, Mississippi. The Voting Rights Section had gone from ensuring voting rights for all Americans to focusing on the conservative bugaboo of “reverse racism.”

As I reported a few months ago, because the U.S. has declared war against Al Qaeda–and KSM is quite obviously a member of Al Qaeda–they can claim legal authority to detain him even post-acquittal, until the end of hostilities, under the authority granted by the Authorization to Use Military Force. The Bush administration considered doing this briefly with Osama bin Laden‘s limo driver, Salim Hamdan–but because it makes a mockery of the American system of justice, they decided against it. But the options don’t actually end there.

“They have three sources of authority that would allow him to detain him, one of which is the AUMF, because it directly cites the 9/11 attacks in its language–the people who planned the 9/11 attacks are combatants, and are detainable under the AUMF,” Ken Gude, a human rights expert at the Center for American Progress explains. “Under the .000001 chance that they are acquitted, they will have that authority to detain them,” Gude says.

I’m awaiting all the liberty-loving Tea Partiers to start ranting about Obama Show Trials any minute now.

Contrary to recent assertions that one in seven, or 14 percent, of the former prisoners had “returned to the battlefield,” our analysis of Pentagon reports, news stories, and other public records indicates that the number who were confirmed or suspected to be involved in anti-U.S. violence is closer to one in 25, or 4 percent.

Worth remembering: this matches the figure that Defense Secretary Robert Gates gave in congressional testimony in January.

“As a legal matter, it is a non-outrageous statement,” says Ben Wittes, a self-identified centrist and legal expert with the Brookings Institution who has proposed a legal framework for preventive detention of suspected terrorists. “It is a very difficult political position to sustain however.” Ken Gude, a human rights and national security expert at the Center for American Progress, agrees. “Technically the government can continue to detain an individual after they’ve been acquitted in a military court, as a matter of law,” says Gude. “As a matter of policy, it’s a terrible decision.”

It doesn’t make any sense to say — as both Johnson and Assistant Attorney General David Kris did at Tuesday’s hearing — that the administration’s preferred method for adjudicating terrorism cases is prosecution in federal courts and also that any acquital could theoretically be met with a prompt detention. That’s a surefire way to destroy the credibility of the criminal justice system. Johnson, to be fair, was asked a politically difficult question: So, you guys gonna just let terrorists go after incompetent courts don’t convict ‘em? But he still waded the administration out into the perilous legal waters of endorsing show trials.

Which makes this exchange captured by Adam Serwer at The American Prospect all the more precious. Serwer was at the court hearing Friday of Mohamed Jawad, accused of throwing a grenade at a U.S. military vehicle in Afghanistan when he was somewhere between 12 and 14 years old. After being imprisoned and tortured in an Afghan prison (according to a U.S. military judge), Jawad eventually landed at Guantanamo Bay, where he’s spent the last seven years — approximately one-third of his life.

The hearing itself, Serwer notes, was mostly about legal procedure and scheduling. But it did include this:

[T]here was an amusing exchange between the judge and a lawyer from the DoJ who tried to explain that she had a scheduling conflict with one of the dates the judge had set. “I’m going on vacation that week,” the lawyer explained. The judge paused and stared at the lawyer. “He’s been incarcerated for a very long time,” she said.

No word yet on whether the lawyer changed her vacation plans.