Melvin Watt: “I hate terrorists. They are the scum of the Earth. There is nothing lower than a terrorist. They are worse even than…”

“I hate terrorists. They are the scum of the Earth. There is nothing lower than a terrorist. They are worse even than people who shoot folks in the back. And if this bill were limited to terrorists, emotionally I would be doing exactly what my colleagues are proposing to do here. But this bill is not limited to terrorists; it goes well beyond terrorists to common ordinary citizens. I read recently with horror a story of parents who, because their child got involved in something they did not like, they locked the child in the room for days at a time. And I got outraged by it. This goes beyond that because what we are doing is locking other children, who had nothing to do with what we are here to talk about, in our constitutional closet with unconstitutional means today, and we are doing it in the name of combating terrorism when we know full well that there is a significant dislike between the two things. Only 100 out of 10,000 habeas corpus issues come from death penalty cases. Even less come from terrorist cases. Yet this bill is not limited either to death penalty cases or to terrorist cases. It is depriving every single American, every single child, every single one of us, of our constitutional protections of habeas corpus.”