All Are Entitled

Today’s Supreme Court decision reaffirms the American ideal that all are entitled to the basic guarantees of our justice system. This is a triumph for the rule of law. Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader, Democrat.

No wonder that fellow is smiling. He is Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who was Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard and is accused of conspiring against U.S. citizens from 1996 through 2001. He is not a good man, but he was likely a good source of information about his boss.

Madame Pelosi goes on to say that today’s decision is a rebuke of the Bush Administration’s detainee policies and a reminder of our responsibility to protect both the American people and our Constitutional rights. Now she is equating terrorists with American citizens.

The decision written by LIBERAL Justice John Paul Stevens said the proposed military war crimes trials for Hamdan and about 450 other terrorists held at Gitmo were illegal under U.S. law and international Geneva conventions.

Justice Kennedy who voted with the majority wrote in his separate opinion that 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.

So we have five Supreme Court justices granting the protections of US law to those who have made war against our country and citizens using terror tactics. If one of the 9/11 terrorists had somehow survived the plane crash these judges would be prepared to grant him bail, and liberal lawyers (remember Ramsey Clark) would be lining up to defend his rights.

And in a moment of supreme irony, Justice Kennedy usurps the Constitutional authority of the executive branch under the pretense of protecting separation of powers. You have to wonder if these guys even understand what they are saying.

In a judicial preview on National Review Online a few days ago Andy McCarthy wrote that if this happens, the Supreme Court will have dictated that we now have a treaty with al Qaeda — which no President, no Senate, and no vote of the American people would ever countenance. The Constitution consigns treaty-making to the political branches, not the courts, but a conclusion that Geneva protects Hamdan (and, by extension, his fellow savages) would ominously mean that the courts, under the conveniently malleable guise of "customary international law" can rewrite treaties to mean whatever they like them to mean. It is likely that such a theory will not rest on a claim that terrorists qualify as honorable prisoners of war under the conventions. It is too obvious that this is not the case.

It is clear that a majority of the Supreme Court believes that it has the power to dictate war making policy to the President, run roughshod over the Constitution’s separation of powers, and endanger the country. We need one more Supreme (goodbye Ginsberg or Stevens) in order to avoid more such travesties of justice.

As for Madame Pelosi, all Americans are entitled to a federal legislature free of imbeciles.