Friday, June 30, 2006

Supreme Court plays the dirty on ol' George

Lawyers behaving badly! Wars can never be won this way! - Mark Alexander
Children play a game called "opposite day." Whatever someone says is taken to mean the opposite. Some Supreme Court justices have apparently never grown out of their appreciation of this game, to judge by their ruling in the Hamdan case involving military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay.

Last year, Congress (you might have heard of it — it writes the nation's laws) passed a bill signed into law by the president of the United States (he also should be familiar — the nation's commander in chief). It said that "no court, justice or judge" shall have the jurisdiction to consider habeas corpus applications of detainees at Gitmo. It would take a legal escape artist on par with David Blaine to wiggle out of that one, but, sure enough, five Supreme Court justices were up to the task.

The Supreme Court has an important role in our constitutional scheme, but it is not fit to, nor was it ever meant to, render fundamental judgments about matters of war and peace. For that we have the elected branches, primarily the executive, which has the flexibility and the focus to prosecute wars. But today's court knows no bounds. The Supreme Court at War by Rich Lowry for the Jewish World Review
Mark Alexander

3 comments:

Always On Watch said...

SCOTUS is way out of line on this one. I guess that 9/11 didn't have much impact on some of the justices.

Mark said...

It seems that it didn't. Damn ridiculous, if you ask me. What the hell are these judges thinking about? Talk about undermining the war effort from within!

Eleanor © said...

The Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States are only men...and can and do make decision that are not set in stone and can be reverse. Here is source to an audio file from C-Span, a public service cable outlet. Unfortunately I can't link to the exact file -- 1 hr. 24 min. Georgetown University Discussion on Hamdan v.Rumsfeld in which a distinguished panel discusses this odios decision and its relation to the Geneva Conventions.