The Administration's draft legislative proposal to deal with the Hamdan decision produced two very different editorials at two of America's major newspapers on Saturday.

The New York Times editorial is titled The Court Under Siege. In the Times's view, the proposal amounts to a "new offensive against the courts." This is pure nonsense. Hamdan is a statutory interpretation decision. If a court says that a statute means X, introducing legislation to amend the statute to say Y instead is not in any sense an action against the court. "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is," as Chief Justice Marshall famously declared in Marbury v. Madison. Where the law in question is statutory and not constitutional, it is just as emphatically the province and duty of the legislative branch to say what the law should be.

Cooler heads prevailed at the Washington Post.  The Post's editorial doesn't like the proposal either, but they go through it point by point and argue as a matter of policy that Congress should substantially amend this proposal rather than enact it as is. Fair enough. That is what legislative debate is all about.

False alarms cause insidious damage by reducing the response to real alarms. At some point, the courts may actually be under siege. Then we will need the editorials of America's great newspapers to raise the alarm. Having diminished its own credibility by crying wolf this time, the Times's voice will be less effective when it is really needed.