No on Gitmo. The Supreme Court redeemed the honor of the United States today in ruling that Dubya may not subject prisoners at Guantanamo to military tribunals.

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that President Bush overstepped his authority in ordering military war crimes trials for Guantanamo Bay detainees, saying in a strong rebuke that the trials were illegal under U.S. and international law.

Bush [nonetheless] said there might still be a way to work with Congress to sanction military tribunals for detainees and the American people should know the ruling "won't cause killers to be put out on the street."

[BUT] The court declared 5-3 that the trials for 10 foreign terror suspects violate U.S. law and the Geneva conventions. [So it doesn't matter what Congress tries to do. We are bound by the Geneva conventions, and the U.S. may not defy those conventions, which we signed.] * * *

Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the court, said the Bush administration lacked the authority to take the "extraordinary measure" of scheduling special military trials for inmates, in which defendants have fewer legal protections than in civilian U.S. courts. * * *

It was a broad defeat for the government, which two years ago suffered a similar loss when the high court held the president lacked authority to seize and detain terrorism suspects and indefinitely deny them access to courts or lawyers.

Bush's cabal of would-be tyrants is very unhappy over this check upon their aspirations to do whatever they please to whomever they please anywhere on Earth they please. That was the base issue.

"Trial by military commission raises separation-of-powers concerns of the highest order," Kennedy wrote in his opinion. "Concentration of power (in the executive branch) puts personal liberty in peril of arbitrary action by officials, an incursion the Constitution's three-part system is designed to avoid."

Would that the people had as much respect for the Constitution and fear of the excessive concentration of power that the Supreme Court has. Too many people in this country, and every country, are willing to trade liberty for security. It is because the bulk of people are cowards subject to idiotic passions that we have a republic, not a direct democracy.
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The hope of the Framers of our Constitution was that the nobler, wiser, more courageous among us would be selected for high office, and they would protect us from the stupidity, cowardice, and bigotry of the mob. They recognized, however, that even a majority of elected representatives might be inclined to attacks upon liberties, so required supermajorities for, among other things, amendments to the Constitution.
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Their wisdom was shown two days ago when a proposal to amend the Constitution to ban flag-burning failed by a single vote, getting almost the necessary two-thirds vote in the Senate. What a bunch of hacks. The Constitution is not supposed to deal with trivia, but with grand issues of public policy, the duties of government, and the rights of individuals. Whether a piece of cloth is burned does not rise to the level of a Constitutional concern.
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But Republican scumbags trying to distract the electorate from the serious distress that their policies have caused the majority of Americans — ever deeper personal debt at abusively high interest rates, oppressive gasoline and fuel-oil prices, mounting property taxes and sales taxes as states and localities try to make up for the shortfall produced by Federal policies, skyrocketing violent crime because the Bush Administration cut financial aid for local police, their sons (and an occasional dauter) shipped home from Iraq in body bags, and on, and on — keep dangling shiny "values" issues in front of our eyes to keep us thinking that they're "on our side", when in fact they hate us all, except the rich.
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Will the Democrats be able to redirect the attention of the voters to the terrible things that have happened to them during the Republican years? Probably not.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,529. More than incidentally, in past months the number of killed would often stay the same for days at a time, but recently it has jumped pretty much every day.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:56 PM