Jay Inslee: “while I was watching the spectacular fireworks July 4 over the Washington Monument, I was reminded that our Revolution…”

“while I was watching the spectacular fireworks July 4 over the Washington Monument, I was reminded that our Revolution and experiment in freedom and liberty is still going on. We are still faced with struggles to protect our basic freedoms. We are still faced with the need to occasionally rein in unchecked authority of the executive branch of government. We still need to stand up for the proposition that no Chief Executive should be able to throw into a dark, deep cell an American citizen without eventually affording that citizen a trial. That is a basic American proposition. We still believe that reviewing an incarceration decision by the judicial system is the best way to ensure both security and liberty. And make no mistake, we face real threats to our physical safety, and those miscreants ought to be punished to the full extent of the law. But we have always founded our democracy on the proposition that detention ultimately must be subject to a hearing and a review, and we should not abandon that principle now out of fear. In the words of Supreme Court Justice Stevens, we ``have created a unique and unprecedented threat to the freedom of every American citizen,'' and that ``unconstrained executive detention for the purpose of investigating and preventing subversive activity is the hallmark of the Star Chamber.'' Freedom is not free. It demands us to stand up against threats to freedom.”