The rule of law, undone

The government has barred a British musicologist from entering the United States. Nailani Ghuman was born in Wales to a British mother and a father who moved from India to Britain in the 1960's. Her father, a Sikh, he is an emeritus professor of educational psychology. Ms. Ghuman is not exactly a stranger to these shores: she got a Ph.D. from Berkeley, is an assistant professor at Mills College in California, and has been working here for a decade.

The Ghuman case has raised a furor among academics and civil libertarians already concerned over the exclusion of foreign scholars.

While it is true that keeping out people like Ms. Ghuman is a blow to the intellectual health--and, because of that, the well-being and prosperity of the nation--I view it more as a sign of what happens when the rule of law is absent.

Ms. Ghuman's exclusion did not occur recently; it happened thirteen months ago, when she was taken from a plane in San Francisco by armed officers from ICE (that's the new INS in this Homeland Security age). Since then, she and a lawyer for Mills College have been trying to find out the reason for the revocation of her visa, and the issuance of an order barring her from this country. They have had no success. The security mania has meant that such decisions are secret and, because of that, immune to review or legal process.

This is a crisis that goes far beyond questions of who can come into the United States, or who can fly on an airplane. The Bush administration and its acolytes have constructed a redoubt of "national security" inside which the Constitution and the law do not apply--the only writ is that of the executive. That is worrisome in its very existence, but what is positively scary is that the size of that fortress could expand to exclude more and more matters of importance from the rule of law.

(This is, by the way, not merely frightening because a part of our country is being taken from us--bad enough--but because removing the law from society is the best way, short of physical destruction, to sap our economic strength and diminish our place in the world.)

The supremacy of the Constitution and laws of the United States over every act (and failure to act) that the government undertakes is central to the very existence of this nation. Threats to the rule of law, such as those mounted by the present administration, should be a central issue in the 2008 campaign, and every candidate should be quizzed on what she or he will do to restore the law to its rightful place in our lives.