Balancing liberty and presidential authority

The Miami Herald has an interesting op-ed on the Fourth Circuit's recent Padilla opinion. The op-ed begins as follows:

The extraordinary rebuke issued by the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals to the Bush administration last week in the case of "dirty bomber" Padilla may be a watershed in the debate over the presidential exercise of wartime powers. This has been a friendly venue for the administration on the issue of "enemy combatants," but it refused to endorse the twisted legal maneuvering over the Padilla detention. The implicit message is that the administration is running out of credible arguments to support an imperial view of the president's wartime powers.