Will's caveat on his Kelo thoughts reminds me to note, for formality's sake, the obvious: the opinions I express are my own and should not be attributed to my employer or co-workers, past or present. Nor should they be attributed to my co-bloggers, family, or friends. Perhaps sometimes they agree with me, perhaps sometimes they don't, and I don't always know myself.

I haven't asked, for instance, what they (all or or any of them) think of rampant jaywalking, which is one of the things that I just really like about DC. Some of the swarms are probably well known, like the Hill staffers heading out of Union Station in the morning, dressed to varying degrees of formality and carrying disproportionately few cups of coffee. I walked with them once this week as I was heading to catch a Senate committee hearing. There are the hints of power and status that come with their destination but, forgive me for saying this, some do look so incredibly young in suits not quite properly scaled down for bodies that have not seen two decades of expense-account lunches. So severely dressed! I wanted to laugh, and I wanted to join them.

Still, at the moment my favorite jaywalk is the path I take every week day, through an area with fewer clumps of people and more cars. The walk up Wilson Blvd. from Rosslyn is littered with intersections. The civilians, casually-dressed and suited both, jaywalk, but it's the servicemen in Army camos and Coast Guard uniforms, crossing against the lights with their shiny shoes and long strides, that give real confidence to civil disorder as they walk towards the unblinking red hands. I'd never figured before that this is one of the things you're allowed to do while in uniform but the size of the salad bars on some of the older ones suggests that the habit reaches up to the local top brass.

Checking Volokh, I see that no one has mentioned my own favorite constitutional one-liner, so I'll post it here. It's from Ex Parte Milligan, the civil war era case upholding the right of habeas corpus even during war, and even for accusations of aiding the enemy:

"Wicked men, ambitious of power, with hatred of liberty and contempt of law, may fill the place once occupied by Washington and Lincoln, and if this right is conceded, and the calamities of war again befall us, the dangers to human liberty are frightful to contemplate". 71 U.S. 2 (1866).

To some extent, my fondness for this line from Milligan has something to do with semantics - I find the word wicked intrinsically persuasive, somehow. But even more important is the underlying principle - the great hope that on the fateful day a truly wicked person does sit in Washington's place, the agents of liberty our founders dispersed so wisely will rouse themselves and throttle him.

The constitution is not only a backstop against the wicked, of course. It is designed for the normal course of well meaning but stupid men. But in some ways, I can't help but feel that the constitution's ultimate duty is to succeed where all other constitutional foundations have failed, in the moment of real exigency in the face of an evil, rather than misguided or silly, man. May we never be put to the test.

Dahlia Lithwick, on Kelo:

So the city had a plan. Who doesn't have a plan?