What makes this unlike most scandals is that it is being played out right before our eyes. Nine solid months of adoring media coverage can do strange things to people: So flattered were the Liberals by the courtier press that they actually thought they could pass a law putting themselves above the law.

As approved by the Commons, Bill C-22, "an act respecting certain agreements concerning the redeveloping and operation of Terminals 1 and 2," would go where no legislation in Canadian history has gone before. In forbidding the jilted developers any recourse to the courts, it explicitly exempts the government of the day from the obligation to obey the law. And in full view of the public! It is as if the Watergate break-in had been planned live on CNN.

Be clear on this. No one is saying the government cannot cancel the contract, legal and binding though it is; the state does have certain prerogatives, after all. Neither are the merits of the original deal at issue, nor the methods of its negotiation. But a signed contract confers property rights: in this case, to the profits the developers could reasonably expect to earn on the terminals. Cancelling the contract amounts to expropriation of property. And the law requires that expropriation be accompanied by just compensation. The government can't just take your house; it has to pay you a fair price for it.

Again: No one is saying the government had to accept the developers' terms for compensation. That, presumably, is what they were negotiating, before the Grits decided to invoke the War Measures Act. But it does have a duty to bargain in good faith, the surety of which is the avenue to an impartial third party: an arbitrator, or the courts. That is what the bill seeks to deny the developers. And that is why the bill has been sent back by the Senate. The putative thrust of the legislation - to cancel the contract - remains intact. All that has been amended is the bit about cancelling the rule of law.

Of course, the bill itself may not withstand judicial scrutiny. We would have more assurance of this, however, were the right to own property protected in the Charter of Rights, as it is in most civilized constitutions. The purpose is not to prevent governments from taking action in the public interest, but to ensure that those deprived of property in the process are not unjustly treated. Even then, this would be subject to the Charter's "reasonable limits" clause (not to mention "notwithstanding"). Any law that can't meet that standard - an unreasonable limit, in other words - shouldn't be passed.

Meantime, the Senate has done well. (Oho, I hear some readers say. Isn't this the Senate The Globe wanted to abolish for blocking Tory legislation? Right: If the Commons insists, the Senate must defer. Still, the contrast is striking. The Liberal senators mounted the barricades - "Aux kazoos, citoyens!" - over items of ordinary democratic policy: free trade, the GST and so on. Of the two bills the Tory Senate has sent back, one was to suspend normal election rules, the other to suspend due process. But then, as Valery said, power without abuse loses its charm.)

What can be the Liberals' objection? If what they have offered in compensation is fair, they should have no fear of putting it to the courts. The best they have been able to argue is that this would be tiresome. Justice Minister Allan Rock - the justice minister, mind - complained that the government might be tied up in court for "a decade." The Toronto Star, in a piece of jackal-like servility, went further: The courts, it warned, might well find against the government. As a justification for martial law, this has a certain freshness.

So instead the Liberals huff and puff about lobbyists and bagmen and senators protecting their Tory friends. Yet we know that both Grits and Tories were involved in the development consortium. Which raises another question: Why is it the Tories who are calling for a public inquiry into the Pearson deal, and the Liberals who refuse?