Congressman Ron Paul is the lone libertarian, non-interventionist voice at the Republican presidential debates -- and he and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum have often been at odds on how the U.S. should respond to Iran's nuclear program.



But they appear to agree on one important issue: that the indefinite detention language in the recently enacted National Defense Authorization Act is wrong.



When President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act, he made law a provision allowing him to indefinitely detain American citizens in U.S. military custody. Obama did not veto this unconstitutional language on the pretext that he did not want to hold-up the military funding provisions of the bill, and that he didn't plan to use the extraordinary powers it granted him.



During Monday's Republican presidential debate in South Carolina, Wall Street Journal reporter Kelly Evans asked the candidates whether or not they would sign such a bill.



It will surprise no one that former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney took a position similar to Obama's.



Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum answered, "...what the law should be and what the law has been is that if you are a United States citizen and you are detained as an enemy combatant, then you have the right to go to federal court and file a [writ of] habeas corpus and be provided a lawyer. That was the state of the law before the National Defense Authorization Act and that should be the state of the law today." Santorum went on to clarify that such rights should not be available to non-citizen enemy combatants.



Ron Paul later waded in to also oppose the indefinite detention language in the bill by saying, "Now with the military appropriations defense act, this -- this is -- this is major. This says that the military can arrest an American citizen for under suspicion, and he can be held indefinitely, without habeas corpus, and be denied a lawyer indefinitely even in a prison here [in the United States]."



Rick Santorum and Ron Paul may disagree on what our policy toward Iran should be, but it is clear that when it comes to fundamental Article 1 Constitutional protections for American citizens, they are in sync -- and Mitt Romney is the odd man out.