Over at the Corner, Ramesh Ponnuru notes that a post of his,  reporting from a recent Club for Growth summit, occasioned much outrage on the left side of the blogosphere (as in this entry from Glenn Greenwald, who’s my kind of liberaltarian). Ponnuru explains:

What happened is that Ed Crane, the head of the libertarian Cato Institute, asked Romney and Giuliani on separate occasions a polemically-phrased question about the president’s authority to designate detainees as enemy combatants—or, as Crane put it, arrest citizens without review.

Giuliani said he’d only want to use the power “infrequently,” where Romney said he’d like to hear from some smart lawyers before deciding whether to eviscerate what Justice Scalia has, somewhat “polemically,” called “The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers.”

I believe that the basis for Ed’s question was the Jose Padilla case, in which the Bush administration asserted the right to seize an American citizen on American soil and hold him without charges or access to counsel for the duration of the war on terror–in other words, perhaps forever. (Padilla has since been charged in civilian court, but the administration has never renounced the power it asserted).

I wasn’t there, so I didn’t hear the exact phrasing of the question, but from the account above, Ponnuru seems to think that asking whether the president should have the power to “arrest citizens without review” is an example of polemical phrasing. Yet that was the very power asserted in the Padilla case. You can defend that constitutional theory or oppose it, but the description is neutral and accurate. In contrast, “designate detainees as enemy combatants” is a euphemistic word-cloud, obscuring what’s really at issue.