Telling responses
Sometimes the masks come off.
The Supreme Court's 5-4 decision yesterday affirming that the Guantanamo detainees have access to Federal courts and the protections of the Constitution was a rebuke to President George W. Bush and his conduct of the war against terrorism, real and imagined. It was also a sharp rebuke to the rightwing movement in America that produced Bush. One of the tenets of that movement is worship of executive and corporate power, which it hoped to enshrine by denying access to the courts to anyone, be they detainees in Gitmo or citizens injured by a reckess corporation, who might challenge that power and force the mighty ones to do something they otherwise could not be forced to do.
The responses yesterday were telling. Bush, who seems to have lost his love for 5-4 Supreme Court decisions when they don't go his way, said: "We'll abide by the court's decision. That doesn't mean I have to agree with it. It was a deeply divided court, and I strongly agree with those who dissented." Actually, as Salon.com points out, he doesn't have any choice about abiding by the decision.
Chief Justice John Roberts, hailed just recently for his supposed new moderate bent, let the mask fall, sounding more like Rush Limbaugh defending Bush than a Supreme Court justice. He railed against "judicial activism," a rightwing code word for any court decision, no matter how grounded in law and the Constitution, that displeases them. Roberts said the decision would cause the American people to "lose a bit more control over the conduct of this nation's foreign policy to unelected, politically unaccountable judges." Look at what he's really saying: if the President does it, the Supreme Court has no right to hold him to Constitutional standards.
And of course, Justice Antonin Scalia, who New York Magazine has revealed to be a closet fan of Sarah Jessica Parker and 'Sex and the City,' did his best to imitate screaming Nazi judge Roland Freisler in the White Rose trial, warning that, "Americans will be killed!" Judicial temperament went out the window.
It isn't over, as satisfying as that court decision was to anyone who values American constitutional values. Bush has suggested he might try to ram a new law through Congress--an excellent distraction for the fall campaign, even if doomed to failure. Attorney General Mukasey says the Gitmo 'military commission' hearings will go forward as planned, well-timed for the fall election.
After all, if the President is the supreme leader of the nation, how can a mere Supreme Court decision stop him from exercising his will? I'm being sarcastic. Stay tuned.