It's interesting that the first president to suspend the writ of habeas corpus along with a handful of other constitutional rights was a Republican.

When the Civil War broke out at Fort Sumter in 1861, Abraham Lincoln convened a special session of Congress to inform it that despite the clear language of the Bill of Rights, the prerogative for suspending individual liberties belonged to the president alone. He pronounced the legislative and judicial branches irrelevant during wartime.

"I'm a war president," Lincoln said before uttering a Cheneyesque expletive. Most of the assembled Union generals looked away in embarrassment. "If we have to shut down every newspaper and jail every dissident who questions our authority, well, that's the price of liberty," he said.

As much as Lincoln regularly made mincemeat of constitutional niceties, even he never dreamed of suspending the election of 1864, Civil War or no Civil War. Gen. George McClellan, the disgruntled Army officer Lincoln fired several years earlier, was the Democrats' standard bearer in an election every pundit assumed would oust the 16th president.

"The election is a necessity," Lincoln said between clenched teeth. "We cannot have a free government without elections. If the rebellion could force us to forgo or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered us."

Ah, the pesky, if somewhat selective, moral clarity of our greatest Republican president. If only Lincoln had a man like DeForest B. Soaries Jr., chairman of the Orwellian-sounding U.S. Election Assistance Commission, on the case. He might have been spared the indignity of an uncomfortably close election he won.

Exactly 140 years after Lincoln insisted that postponing a federal election was a bigger threat to democracy than a Civil War that had already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, Homeland Security czar Tom Ridge asked the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel to review Soaries' scheme to, well, put democracy under house arrest.

Soaries wants the Bush administration to light a fire under Congress for emergency legislation that would give his newly minted agency the authority to reschedule federal elections if bin Laden happens to burp on Nov. 2.

God forbid al-Qaida detonates a dirty bomb at a Topeka shopping mall on Election Day. A few people might be killed and dozens sent to hospitals with radiation burns. According to Soaries, any magnitude of terrorist attack would be a pretext for postponing the election for the tens of millions of Americans outside the blast area who would vote if allowed to.

But a few wacky lawyers and Bush appointees won't let a dry piece of parchment like the Constitution scuttle their Machiavellian ambitions. Instead of encouraging the American people to be defiant in the face of threats to our system, the Bush administration wants to suspend the democratic process until the terrorist threat has passed: "If you vote, the terrorists win," they insist.

The Bush administration has a curious knack for exploring the edges of legal theory. Whether thinking out loud about the legality of torture, stuffing Americans suspected of aiding al-Qaida into a constitutional black hole, building a police state in everything but name only or inquiring into what it takes to suspend a federal election, they enjoy thinking the unthinkable.

Twenty years ago, when nuclear war seemed more imminent than it does today, the U.S. Postal Service assured us that mail delivery and tax collection wouldn't skip a beat no matter how thick the mushroom clouds were. By contrast, this crowd wants us to restrict our votes to "American Idol" and forget about American democracy until they give the "all clear" signal.

Instead of trying to dump the election, President Bush ought to instruct his legal eagles to look for ways to dump Dick Cheney from the Republican ticket. It would be their most patriotic and politically astute move in a long time.