Speaking to MSNBC on Monday night, Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley said he believes former Vice President Dick Cheney’s push to have U.S. troops deployed to Buffalo, New York to arrest six alleged terrorists was just one example out of many in Cheney’s “full court press” against the Constitution.

“This is sort-of like a dormant virus that lives in our democracy,” said Turley. “There are people who seem to long for authority, control, even domination.”

The Lackawanna Six, ultimately arrested by the FBI, were a group of young Yemeni-Americans who had attended an al Qaeda training camp in 2001. They were arrested in September 2002, and President Bush bragged of having broken their “cell” in his January 2003 State of the Union address.

However, an investigation by Salon failed to turn up any evidence that they were actually a “sleeper cell” or that they had been planning any kind of violent attack. Most of them were convicted merely of providing material aid to terrorists.

Cheney’s idea, to use soldiers for the arrests, would have violated both Fourth Amendment guarantees against search and seizure without probable cause and the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which makes it illegal to use the military for law enforcement.

Despite those prohibitions, Cheney argued that the president did have the power to use the military on US soil, citing an October 23, 2001 Justice Department memorandum co-authored by John Yoo which claimed that presidential power extended to the domestic use of the military as long as it served a national security purpose.

Explaining how clearly illegal it is for the government to use the military for domestic police actions, Turley clarified that the only reason it did not happen is because Bush did not approve of it.

“What you saw in this period was, across the board [...] this was the same period when they were ramping up the torture issue and they were ramping up enemy combatants. It was a full-court press on the Constitution. They were trying to create an atmosphere of fear in which the American people would give them more power.”

He later joked that for civil libertarians, acknowledging Bush actually bucked Cheney and refused to deploy troops into Buffalo is “sort-of like that last scene with Darth Vader saying, ‘Take my helmet off son, I am with you.’”

This video is from MSNBC’s Countdown, broadcast July 27, 2009.