The Bush administration's proposed Department of Homeland Security is stalled in Congress. It is stalled not, as one might expect, because the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate fear the bill would threaten civil liberties in the United States by vastly increasing the national security state--rather, the Democrats worry that it would create a class of nonunionized federal employees. Instead, the most vocal critics of the bill's impact on American liberties are not Democrats at all but a group that used to be among George W. Bush's most reliable allies: libertarian and religious conservatives. ... At a time of national trial, this alliance has done more to check executive overreaching and to defend individual liberty than the big-government liberals running the Democratic Party, who have been all too happy to respond to demands by the public and the president for security above all. For this we have the paranoid strain in American politics to thank.