James Frank Solís: Is the Supreme Court now an ally in the Left's War on The President?

30 June 2006

Is the Supreme Court now an ally in the Left's War on The President?

12:39 PM

I don’t really know.  I haven’t finished reading the Court’s opinion in the Hamdan case.  I can’t wait.  I don’t know that the editorial writers of the WaPo have read the opinion, but here it is.  My guess is that they don’t have to read the opinion or analyze the Court’s reasoning: it’s enough for them that the President has been handed a seeming set-back.  In contrast with the WaPo, Ronald Cass has a reaction which I strongly suspect I will agree with once I have read the opinion myself.  Here’s a sample:

So we come to the last loop in the Court's triple jump - its reliance on international common law. The Court, interpreting the requirements of federal law, makes a critical observation, one no one would have expected a few short years ago: the military tribunals do not provide the sort of procedures "recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples." There you have it. We can now turn to international common law to find out what our laws require. Who better than the Iraqis and North Koreans, Khaddafi's Libya, Mugabe's Zimbabwe and Chavez's Venezuela to tell us what our laws command? That's the Court's reading of the law. To make matters worse, by making Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions (the linchpin of this analysis) both legally enforceable and dependent on international common law, the Court has opened a door to criminal liability for American citizens, soldiers, and government officials on terms we cannot predict and would never approve.

You can read SCOTUSblog’s Marty Lederman’s reaction, here.

Now, although I have not yet read the opinion I do have 2 observations.

1.

The Supreme Court applies the restrictions imposed on us by the Geneva Convention to our war on terror.  Now, I agree with Geneva, but as a soldier I reject the notion that terrorists ought to be elevated to the status of soldier.  Besides Geneva is a treaty to which terrorists are not signatories.  And the Senate has ratified no treaty with terrorists.  So the Court has essentially entered into a treaty with the terrorists.  How nice for the terrorists.  And the Times al-Nuyoriqi is worried about Bush’s expansion of the federal government’s power?  Give me a close, intimately personal break.

2.

Nancy Pelosi is happy about the decision.  According to her “all” are entitled to the protections of the Constitution.  In this context, all has to mean either: (1) Every individual or anything of a given class; or (2) everyone.  To her, this “all” includes terrorist suspects, so it cannot be the first option.  The first option would limit the “all” to all citizens of the United States—and only citizens of the United States.  (I think it obvious that we should extend these protections to visitors, which terrorists outside the territory of the U. S. are not.)  So she must mean that everyone on earth is protected by the Constitution of the United States.

Can she really mean that?  If so then one is at a loss to understand how the U. S. could ever wage war.  After all, one of the protections that we, the people of the United States, enjoy is not having our government wage war on us.  Really, if “all” are protected by the Constitution and no one can be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law (i.e., apart from court action), then just how is the U. S. to wage war on anyone, ever, much less terrorists?

This is the sort of nonsense that can come out of the mouth of someone who is in such a hurry to be more-cosmopolitan-than-thou that she doesn’t even think about the implications of the rubbish that comes out of her bung hole.

P.S.

It occurs to me:  The Dems are all excited about the possibility of winning the House and being able to impeach the President.  Fine.  Let them do so if they can.  But since the International wing of the Supreme Court is driven to subject us to laws foreign to our Constitution (one of the nasty things that King George III did to anger our founders) it would be really great if we could impeach them.  (Especially is this the case when you take into account the fact that the Supreme Court arguably ignored a statue depriving it of jurisdiction over the matters it adjudicated: The Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, Pub. L. No. 109-148, § 1005(e), 119 Stat. 2680, 2741 [December 30, 2005].)  Otherwise we may find that we have won the war on terror and at the same time still have lost our sovereignty.  We ought not to allow the war on terror to blind us to the fact that a less obvious—but equally as serious—attack on our existence (i.e., as a sovereign nation) has long been under way.  We can be ruled by a Muslim World Caliphate, a Secular World Caliphate, or by ourselves—understanding, of course, that we must be honest players in the international community of nations, especially as the world’s lone “super power.”

Is the Supreme Court now an ally in the Left's War on The President?

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