Henninger is, as usual, spot on:
The hyper-complex requirements and mindset reflected in the public record over 130 Liberty St. mirror the endless debate and litigation we've also layered into efforts to surveil and prosecute terrorists.
Yes, partisanship plays its part, but intellectual hubris and self-regard plays a larger part. We've got a society that's smarter than ever, but maybe too smart for its own good. Whether the problem before us is national security, the environment or protecting baby, we compulsively drive the system now to develop the most exquisite, complex procedures, which allow us to think ourselves both perfectly safe and ethically perfect.
Procedural perfectionism has been raised to religious status.
In other words, it's not the devil that's in the details - God is the details. All hail the details.
One really does get the impression that the Republic could fall and the word be cast back into the Stone Age, and certain (mostly Leftist) procedure freaks would be okay with that, just so long as every detail of the collapse of civilization met their criteria.
This is not to say that procedures are bad - I love good procedures and make my living following them and helping others devise good ones. One of the protections against another Leftist fetish, what Thomas Sowell calls Cosmic Justice, is to be found in the concept of procedural fairness (rather than a perfect fairness of outcomes, which would be unattainable).
The answer is unclear. Perhaps the (perhaps mythical) Icelandic tradition I once heard has it best, that once a year during the winter, the entire law is recited aloud to the people by the eldest and wisest. If a law is forgotten and none correct them, it passes out of the law. Of course, this would require that the law be short enough to read aloud (or memorize and recite) in a single winter, or even a single year. We couldn't even get through the tax code in that time...
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