Back in January 2009, when President Obama was assembling his Justice Department team, liberal bloggers were giddy with excitement over the fine, fine people he was picking. Champions of the Constitution, and paragons of virtue, they were going to preside over the Constitution’s slow but complete recovery from the gang rape it had suffered for so long at the hands of Bush and the Bushmen.

Here’s a perfectly representative example of the hosannas that greeted every key appointment, from Marcy Wheeler at emptywheel:

If you needed any further proof that things are different–very different–today, there’s this: Balkinization blogger Marty Lederman will take John Yoo’s former position, Deputy Assistant Attorney General for OLC.

As of today, the commencement of the Obama Administration, he begins work as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel. There he will be joined by two of his former OLC colleagues, Dawn Johnsen, nominated to be head of the office; and David Barron, who will serve as the Principal Deputy (and as the Acting AAG while the Senate considers Dawn’s nomination).

We’ve replaced the guy who did Bush and Cheney’s evil bidding with a blogger-prof and Constitutional champion, Marty Lederman.

Welcome to a new day, America.

It wasn’t just bloggers, either. The Washington Post gushed thusly:

President Obama has made fine choices in tapping Dawn E. Johnsen as chief of the Office of Legal Counsel and Martin S. Lederman and David Barron as her deputies. His selection of David S. Kris to head the department’s National Security Division is another excellent move. The appointments signal a return to the best traditions of the Justice Department …
[...]
Ms. Johnsen, Mr. Lederman and Mr. Barron, OLC lawyers during the Clinton administration and law professors since, have been leading and thoughtful critics of Bush administration policies on detention and national security.

And McClatchy brought us:

In filling four senior Justice Department positions Monday, President-elect Barack Obama signaled that he intends to roll back Bush administration counterterrorism policies authorizing harsh interrogation techniques, warrantless spying and indefinite detentions of terrorism suspects.

That was then.

After a long and disappointing succession of cases in which the Obama Justice Department Dream Team not only supported Bush-era positions but in several instances cheerfully outBushed the Bush Justice Department, this, sadly, is now:

A federal appeals court ruled Friday that three men who had been detained by the United States military for years without trial in Afghanistan had no recourse to American courts. The decision was a broad victory for the Obama administration in its efforts to hold terrorism suspects overseas for indefinite periods without judicial oversight.

The detainees, two Yemenis and a Tunisian who say they were captured outside Afghanistan, contend that they are not terrorists and are being mistakenly imprisoned at the American military prison at Bagram Air Base.

But a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled unanimously that the three had no right to habeas corpus hearings, in which judges would review evidence against them and could order their release. The court reasoned that Bagram was on the sovereign territory of another government and emphasized the “pragmatic obstacles” of giving hearings to detainees “in an active theater of war.”

The ruling dealt a severe blow to wider efforts by lawyers to extend a landmark 2008 Supreme Court ruling granting habeas corpus rights to prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. A lower court judge had previously ruled that the three Bagram detainees were entitled to the same rights, although he had found that others captured in Afghanistan and held there were not.

A lawyer for the detainees, Tina Foster, said that if the precedent stood, Mr. Obama and future presidents would have a free hand to “kidnap people from other parts of the world and lock them away for the rest of their lives” without having to prove in court that their suspicions about such prisoners were accurate.

“The thing that is most disappointing for those of us who have been in the fight for this long is all of the people who used to be opposed to the idea of unlimited executive power during the Bush administration but now seem to have embraced it during this administration,” she said.

Here’s the crux of the matter:

The men’s case was originally heard by Judge John D. Bates of the Federal District Court, an appointee of former President George W. Bush. The Bush and Obama administrations had both urged Judge Bates not to extend habeas corpus rights beyond Guantánamo, arguing that courts should not interfere with military operations inside active combat zones.

But in April 2009, Judge Bates ruled that there was no difference between the three men who had filed suit and Guantánamo prisoners. His decision was limited to non-Afghans captured outside Afghanistan — a category that fits only about a dozen of the roughly 800 detainees at Bagram, officials have said.

In urging the appeals court to let Judge Bates’s decision stand, lawyers for the detainees argued that reversing it would mean that the government would be able “to evade judicial review of executive detention decisions by transferring detainees into active combat zones, thereby granting the executive the power to switch the Constitution on or off at will.”

Those who we once naively celebrated as champions of the Constitution are now fighting for the government’s right to switch the Constitution on or off at will. And winning.