As the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor predictably devolved into mindless Republican regurgitation about wise Latinas, empathy, judicial activism and New Haven firefighters, one revealing exchange about the impact of the September 11 attacks was largely overlooked. The 9/11 tragedy, Sotomayor insisted, "doesn't change" the Constitution. As it turns out, her claim that "the Constitution is a timeless document" is a far cry from the philosophy of Jeff Sessions, John Cornyn and other Republicans who brushed off its protections by announcing, "None of your civil liberties matter much after you're dead."
In the wake of the December 2005 revelations regarding President Bush's regime of illegal NSA domestic surveillance, former Texas Supreme Court Justice turned Senator John Cornyn suggested 9/11 had rendered the Constitution as well as the Geneva Conventions quaint:

"None of your civil liberties matter much after you're dead."

Echoing the Republicans' "give me death" defense of warrantless wiretapping was Kansas Senator Pat Roberts. Roberts, whose claim to fame was stonewalling the Senate's so-called Phase II investigation into the misuse of pre-Iraq war intelligence, declared:

"You really don't have any civil liberties if you're dead."

In February 2006, Alabama's Jeff Sessions, now Sotomayor's leading Republican inquisitor on the Senate Judiciary Committee, summed up the GOP's post-9/11 Constitution:

"Over 3,000 Americans have no civil rights because they are no longer with us."

For her part, Judge Sotomayor on Tuesday in response to Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) rejected outright the Republicans' blasphemous notion of a contingent Constitution:

FEINGOLD: So I'm going to ask you some questions that I asked now-Chief Justice Roberts at his hearing. Did that day, 9/11, change your view of the importance of individual rights and civil liberties and how they can be protected?
SOTOMAYOR: ...in answer to your specific question, did it change my view of the Constitution? No, sir, the Constitution is a timeless document. It was intended to guide us through decades, generation after generation, to everything that would develop in our country. It has protected us as a nation. It has inspired our survival. That doesn't change.

It does, apparently, if George W. Bush is in the White House and is being protected by his Republican acolytes in Congress and the Justice Department.
Just days before Feingold and Sotomayor discussed the Court's seminal 1952 Youngstown decision which helped define the limits of the President's power as Commander-in-Chief, an Inspectors General report revealed that John Yoo, Bush's legal architect for detainee torture, ignored it altogether in a November 2001 memo blessing the domestic surveillance programs. Ironically, Yoo did mention Youngstown in his feeble attack on the IG report in a Wall Street Journal op-ed today. (Unsurprisingly, Yoo did not reveal to readers that he refused to be interviewed by or otherwise cooperate with the Inspectors General investigation.)
Even as the Sotomayor hearings reached their conclusion, former Republican colleagues of Sessions and Cornyn weighed in on their party's blighted - and dangerous - Bush-era abuses of the U.S. Constitution. As the Huffington Post detailed Thursday, former Representatives Mickey Edwards (R-OK) and Chris Shays (R-CT) "accused their GOP colleagues of putting party politics over the Constitution during the Bush years, arguing that they failed dramatically to check the White House's use of executive powers." As Edwards aptly put it:

"Party trumped Constitution."

Alas for the likes of Jeff Sessions, John Cornyn and their ilk, the United States Constitution and the civil liberties it protects don't matter when you're dead - or when a Republican lives in the White House.