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"..We need to have a political culture in this country where we can debate and disagree strongly about the issues without using the criminal law to cut off our opponent's heads," Calabresi said. "Absent such a culture, we will become just another banana republic."

Is Calabresi overstating the case? Let's allow history to be the judge:

While Chicago natives and violent domestic terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn were living as fugitives, Edward Levi, Gerald Ford’s attorney general, was mounting a campaign against the FBI’s counterintelligence division. Levi, President of the University of Chicago at the time of his appointment, was a strange choice for attorney general if the purpose of that position is understood to include protecting the United States from its domestic enemies. He was a former member of the National Lawyers Guild, an organization cited by the now-defunct House Committee on Un-American Activities as "the foremost legal bulwark of the Communist Party, its front organizations, and controlled unions." Not coincidentally, Bernardine Dohrn was a prominent member of the NLG in the early 70's. As attorney general, Levi eventually indicted FBI acting director L. Patrick Gray, former Chief of Counterintelligence Edward Miller, and former acting associate director W. Mark Felt on charges of "conspiring to injure and oppress citizens of the United States."

The "citizens" in question were members of the Weather Underground.

Following the bombing of the Pentagon in 1972, Felt had authorized 13 surreptitious entries (commonly known as "black bag jobs") of suspected Weather Underground hideouts. This undoubtedly disrupted the terrorist cabal’s plans to complete its bombing "trifecta" by attacking the White House. But Levi insisted on prosecuting Felt and Miller for the supposed crime of preventing terrorism. After a prolonged court battle, Felt was sentenced to a $5,000 fine, and Miller was ordered to pay $3,000. The agents were also saddled with more than one million dollars in legal expenses.

Eventually, 140 FBI agents were brought to trial for their efforts to apprehend Weather Underground terrorists. All of these agents were prosecuted for actions taken in 1972-73 under guidelines created by Levi in 1976 — a violation of the Constitution’s prohibition against ex post facto laws. This amounted to a judicial purge of the FBI’s counter-terrorism division.

As Steven Emerson discovered, in the years leading up to 9/11/2001, aside from the "wall" created by Jamie Gorelick during the Clinton years, the FBI couldn't even keep news clippings of suspected terrorists, for fear of reprimand or prosecution. Thank Edward Levi for that, and don't think it can't happen again. If this is the path the drunk-on-power Democrats choose to go down – whether against the intelligence agencies, administration officials or the military -- this time, when the smoke clears, it will violent jihadists who will “guilty as hell, free as a bird,”