Why This Court Keeps Rebuking This President

New York Times ^ | June 15, 2008 | Jonathan Mahler

[CreativePerspective]

So it is extraordinary that during the Bush administration's seven years, nearly all of them a time of war that began on Sept. 11, 2001, the court has been prompted to push back four times. Last week's decision in Boumediene v. Bush, in which the court ruled that prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have a right to challenge their detentions in the federal courts, marks only the most recent rebuke.

It is not hard to see why the court has traditionally been so quick to side with presidents during armed conflicts. The justices presumably lack the expertise of White House military advisers, and they don't want to be accused of interfering with efforts to keep America safe. "War opens dangers that do not exist at other times," Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote. He had earlier been the author of the Supreme Court's unanimous opinion in a 1919 case upholding the conviction of radicals who had published an antidraft pamphlet during World War I. "When a nation is at war," the opinion said, "many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that no court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right."

In response, the administration succeeded in getting Congress to authorize the military commissions and stripping the Guantanamo detainees of the right to habeas corpus. Which brings us to last week's ruling in Boumediene - and the 5-4 decision to restore that ancient right.

[CreativePerspective]

This is worth reading, because while not the intent, the NYT article demonstrates the huge differences betweeen rulings of previous SCOTUS' about presidential powers in wartime and ruling of this SCOTUS that has been working on undemining the President's powers in his efforts to keep us safe from terrorists.

Note that this is the 4th (!) ruling to favor the terrorists, progressively broader. Also note that the Court disregarded the law passed by Congress (see last paragraph of my exceprt) stripping the terrorist enemy combattants detained at Guanatanamo of the right to habeas corpus.

[RC2]

What this court is saying is that anybody in the world has access to our courts. Bunch of fools.

[gusopol3]

Why This Court Keeps Rebuking This President

six letter answer: S-O-U-T-E-R

[big'ol_freeper]

Elect B. Hussein Obama and the next conservative president will face even more intense rebuking that is a certainty.

Elect Juan McCainez and maybe (emphasis on maybe) we might turn that vote around the other way in the future.

[B4Ranch]

Soon, if it keeps going this way, the only Court that will matter will be the World Court.

[Buckhead]

How about because they are a completely lawless court, blind freaking drunk with power and arrogance? Because they are imbecilic fools? Because they are crazed, weak-minded lunatics, ignorant of history and constitutional structure? Because they have advanced Bush Derangement Syndrome? Because they think they can make the jihadis like us?

Who knows what reasons lurk behind the prating nonsense of their opinions!

[Tai_Chung]

It was a rebuke against all Americans, not just President Bush.

[GOPJ]

Elect Juan McCainez and maybe (emphasis on maybe) we might turn that vote around the other way in the future.

McCain is a a thin reed...

[facedown]

How about because they are a completely lawless court,...

There are four completely lawless lawyers on the court and one useful idiot.

Who knows what reasons lurk behind the prating nonsense of their opinions!

Consolidation of power in the judiciary.

[muawiyah]

It was, in fact, a threat on our lives. The 5 in the majority weighed the threat posed to the public of known terrorists and killers being on the loose to their own ideological comfort.

They decided it was better to have the killers on the loose amongst us than to do anything about it.

Stevens, Ginsburg, Souter, Kennedy and old what's his name, want to kill us.

[TennTuxedo]

Vote for any candidate but McCain and you elect Barack Hussein Obama.

I'm going to hold my nose and pull the lever. I suggest that many of you do so as well, if you know what's good for your children.

[I see my hands]

Traitors boasting.

[CreativePerspective]

“How about because they are a completely lawless court, blind freaking drunk with power and arrogance? “

I think you summed it up well.

Charles Krauthammer made some excellent remarks on FoxNews:

“This is not just perverse. The arrogance of this decision is astonishing. It overturns - it proudly says that for the first time ever it is granting the rights of habeas corpus to enemy aliens who are not on American soil.

It overturns a 1950 decision, which, in and of itself, had said that in all of American history this right had never been accepted or recognized, and before that, in all of the British common laws. So this is an invention.

The worst part of it is that it is in previous decisions when the court had chastised the administration over its detention policy, it had said that the Congress and the president ought to work together and find a remedy, which is what the Congress and the president have done in the Military Tribunal Act.

But what the court has now done is to overturn everything in that act before it even went into effect or practice. As Scalia wrote in commenting on this, he said it looks as if in urging the president and the Congress to actually solve this, the court was kidding in its previous decisions.

And according to one scholar I read, this is the first time in American history that in the middle of the war the court has overturned decision that the two political branches together, the president and Congress, had agreed upon in the conduct of the war. It has never happened. You could overturn a president’s decision, but never a joint decision of the political branches.

What the court has said is that that it stands above all the other branches in granting a right that never existed and does not exist in this constitution.”

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,366346,00.html

[Harrius Magnus]

Note that this is the 4th (!) ruling to favor the terrorists

[Libertarianize the GOP]

The hate Bush contingent at the New York Times strikes again. The Boumediene v. Bush decision was a power grab by five justices or more specifically by Kennedy. The Constitution created three branches and it did not make the courts supreme to the other two branches. Article III Section 2 second paragraph; establishes that the supreme Court shall have Jurisdiction “with such Exceptions and under such Regulations as Congress shall make.” The Military Commissions act explicitly stated that the military tribunals were constitutional and the courts to which enemy combatants had access. The Supreme Court has declared that they believe the courts are supreme to congress and entitled to makeup the rules for how to judge enemy combatants, then carry out the rules that they wrote, and order the other branches of government and the citizens to obey the judicial tyrants. If Congress were interested in anything other than playing politics, like asserting their constitutional authority to write the rules that the courts apply, then Congress would attempt to maintain the balance of power necessary for our Republic to continue.

[Spunky]

[Cold Heat]

I must argue against the false perception that it is Bush who lost something as a result of this decision, when in fact, it is the American people who have lost.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

Truthfully, whether McCain or Obama, I am hoping that the SCOTUS reverses the vast majority of the Patriot Act and every other bit of domestic security legislation and executive orders made by George W. Bush since the beginning of the WoT.

In fact, I hope they strip the federal government of a vast majority of its security and police authority.

Why? Because George W. Bush and his administration have been very honorable in how these laws were executed, and probably accomplished much with them.

But under McCain *or* Obama, I truly doubt that these laws will be used against terrorists. Instead, they will almost exclusively be *abused* and used against non-terrorist Americans.

That is, under either McCain or Obama, while terrorists are allowed to run roughshod, the anti-terrorist gun will be turned around so that it is pointing as us, not them.

Can you imagine the horror if Bill Clinton had the Patriot Act laws when *he* was president? Lord help us. Here was a man, and his wife, who had no problem using hundreds of FBI files against his political enemies, having honest people who were in the way of *patronage jobs* charged with crimes and arrested, and taking money from communist Chinese in exchange for defense technology?

I wouldn’t be shocked by him using Patriot Act provisions to bar Republican voters from election polls, or even calling organizations like the Boy Scouts and the NRA “right wing terrorist organizations”, and having them banned and their assets seized. There would have been literally *nothing* to stop him, and the Republicans were too spineless to even stand in his way, in any serious manner.

Would McCain or Obama have any problem using the Patriot Act provisions to advance their desire for socialized medicine?

How about restoring the “Fairness Doctrine”, to block conservatives from the airwaves?

Would Obama, if not McCain, use such laws to outlaw guns?

THE BOTTOM LINE is that, when we have a bad president, we don’t want to give them the tools to abuse us with.

If the SCOTUS wants to make rulings like this, in the long run, while the terrorists will certainly take advantage of it, their potential for harm against the people of the United States is *less* than the potential for harm by the president.

If we have a bad president, it is better that he be a weak president.

[Cold Heat]

Sorry, but I can't vote for someone that I have been throwing rocks at for twenty years.

The RNC and Congress critters who came up with the brilliant notion that I and others like me who have been hip deep in politics for the last twenty years would once again hold the nose as we did with Dole were tragically mistaken in their judgment.

If all goes as I believe it will, the party will benefit in the long term. However, short term it will be hell.

[Dilbert San Diego]

They should pass the law again, and use the authority under Article 3 Section 2 to exempt the law from judicial review and the possibility of being overturned.