Judge Andrew Napolitano writes:

Can the president use the military to arrest anyone he wants, keep that person away from a judge and jury, and lock him up for as long as he wants? In the Senate's dark and terrifying vision of the Constitution, he can.

How can this be? "Last week, while our minds were on family and turkey and football, the Senate Armed Services Committee . . . drafted an amendment to a bill appropriating money for the Pentagon," Napolitano writes.

"The amendment would permit the president to use the military for law enforcement purposes in the United States," the judge explains, "a radical departure from any use to which the military has been put in the memory of any Americans now living."

What's the upshot? Well, asks Napolitano, "Can you imagine an America in which you could lose all liberty -- from the presumption of innocence to the right to counsel to fairness from the government to a jury trial -- simply because the president says you are dangerous?"

This could never happen in the United States of America, right?

Think again. Or better it, think along with the Founders, says Napolitano:

Nothing terrified or animated the founders more than that. The founders, who wrote the Constitution, had just won a war against a king who had less power than this legislation will give to the president. But to protect their freedoms, they wrote in the Constitution the now iconic guarantee of due process. The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution says, "No person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." Note, the founders used the word "person."

"If this legislation becomes law," Napolitano concludes, "it will be dangerous for anyone to be right when the government is wrong. It will be dangerous for all of us. Just consider what any president could get away with. Who would he make disappear first? Might it be his political opponents? Might it be you?"