Story running in the NYT tomorrow about how J. Edgar Hoover, on the eve of the Korean War, wanted Truman to suspend Habeus Corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty:

Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.

The names were part of an index that Hoover had been compiling for years. “The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States,” he wrote.

“In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” it said.

To his great credit, Truman never signed off on the damned thing. But this is obviously far worse that what’s happening now with the “unlawful combatants” at Gitmo - this would have been American citzizens tossed into the hoosegow, given the “right” to an eventual hearing though under Hoover’s plans those hearings would not be bound by rules of evidence.

This is not a partisan thing; this authoritarian overreaction crosses party lines, and as the NYT notes, the only real modern precedent for this would have been the Palmer Raids - done under a Democratic, progressive president, Woodrow Wilson (or what was left of him, by that point.)

It’s that impulse, that overreaction that must be resisted - whichever side of the aisle it comes from.