The Monkey Cage

That’s just repulsive.

You can be against both Guantanamo and the Supreme Court decision. I believe that Guantanamo, and what’s happened there, is a huge mistake in both moral and pragmatic terms but . . .

A majority of SCOTUS took a purely political stand that has absolutely no grounding in the constitution. The position of SCOTUS is that it can simply force its political will on the country because it is ‘right’ without restriction and this should scare the hell out of everybody.

This decision says that captured North Korean soldiers being held in a prison camp in South Korea during the Korean War were covered by the US constitution and had the right of habeas corpus. Viewed as law, this is so obviously ludicrous that it leads quickly to the only sensible answer: 5 members of the Supreme Court set themselves up as rulers and simply over-rode the decision of the democratically elected government because they thought, however correctly, that it was wrong.

If the Constitution can be read to imply that simply holding someone in a foreign location deprives them of rights they would have if detained on US soil, then the Constitution is flawed. There’s really no debate that ANYONE held in a regular US prison has these rights, regardless of citizenship or crime they are charged with.
I read these numbers as further evidence that democracy is a REALLY bad idea.

It is not “simply holding them in a foreign location.” We are talking about foreign nationals captured in war time operations abroad. These are people who never had constitutional rights under the US constitution: they can not be deprived of something they never had.

Nor are we talking about anyone being held in a “regular US prison.” Anyone arrested in the United States for a criminal code violation would have habeas corpus rights regardless of where they were held: that is not the issue here. We are talking about Prisoners of War who were captured, not arrested which is why they are not in “regular prison” in the first place.

As for democracy being a bad idea, 5 members of SCOTUS agreed with you and acted accordingly.

Hey Robert L., when did we declare war again?

“The position of SCOTUS is that it can simply force its political will on the country because it is ‘right’ without restriction and this should scare the hell out of everybody.”

I thought this was the position of the current president and his cabinet. Huh.

Hi Dan: I used the Korean War analogy, as opposed to say WWII, specifically because we never declared war in Korea though it was, indisputably, a war. We haven’t declared war since what, 1941?, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t held any POWs since 1945.

Hi Susan: I believe SCOTUS is clearly wrong, and has no jurisdiction, on this one but many other aspects of the ‘war on terror’ are clearly subject to SCOTUS scrutiny and, I believe, some of the Bush administration’s domestic policies are unconstitutional and should be over-ruled.