Michael Isikoff of Newsweek is reporting that Bush's chairman of the newly created U.S. Election Assistance Commission, DeForest B. Soaries Jr., has asked Director of Homeland Security Tom Ridge to look into whether he, Ridge, might could just postpone the fall elections in case of terrorist attack. And taking up that novel suggestion, Mr. Ridge asked the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel (the fine folks who brought us the torture-is-not-torture-if-the-president-orders-it memo) to analyze what legal steps would be needed to permit the postponement of the election were an attack to take place.

Are these guys just itching to short-circuit democracy, or what?

If the Department of Justice says, no, you can't do that, Soaries, who two years ago was an unsuccessful GOP candidate for Congress, wants Ridge to seek emergency legislation from Congress empowering his agency to cancel the election.

We hope the Democrats in Congress are past the point where they'll vote for whatever freedom-ending legislation the Republicans put in front of them. But we can never be totally sure of that.