The Thomas Chronicles

Well, it had to happen.

The Presidential candidates are split right down partisan lines on the ruling.

Mr. Obama said that the Supreme Court ruling…

“…ensures that we can protect our nation and bring terrorists to justice while also protecting our core values.”

“The Court’s decision is a rejection of the Bush administration’s attempt to create a legal black hole at Guantanamo - yet another failed policy supported by John McCain,” he said. “This is an important step toward re-establishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law and rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus.”

And Mr. McCain said the Supreme Court ruling on Gitmo is “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”

“We are now going to have the courts flooded with so-called … habeas corpus suits against the government, whether it be about the diet, whether it be about the reading material. And we are going to be bollixed up in a way that is terribly unfortunate because we need to go ahead and adjudicate these cases.”

…

“These are people who are not citizens. They do not and never have been given the rights that citizens in this country have,” he said. “Now, my friends, there are some bad people down there. There are some bad people.”

McCain insisted that though he has fought to make sure that the US military won’t resort to torture, the detainees are still, in fact, “Enemy combatants.”

Needless to say, I agree with McCain. I don’t think foreign terrorists shooting at our troops outside regulated uniforms overseas can be considered U.S. citizens in any way, shape or form, and they certainly should get our civilian legal protections of habeas corpus.

Nationalism and sovereignty mean nothing if our laws became the law of the globe and that everyone therein is made to become little Americans. But, of course, our liberals are very selective about which American laws they want applied to terrorists. Treason and sedition is still on the books, you know.

It is unquestioningly presumptuous and condescending to make our laws applicable to citizens of other countries. This is what the Supreme Court has just done. This is just what Obama just supported.

More reactions:

Neo-neocon

I haven’t read the decision yet, but SCOTUS Blog wrote the following:

In a stunning blow to the Bush Administration in its war-on-terrorism policies, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that foreign nationals held at Guantanamo Bay have a right to pursue habeas challenges to their detention. The Court, dividing 5-4, ruled that Congress had not validly taken away habeas rights. If Congress wishes to suspend habeas, it must do so only as the Constitution allows — when the country faces rebellion or invasion.

The Court stressed that it was not ruling that the detainees are entitled to be released — that is, entitled to have writs issued to end their confinement. That issue, it said, is left to the District Court judges who will be hearing the challenges. The Court also said that “we do not address whether the President has authority to detain” individuals during the war on terrorism, and hold them at the U.S. Naval base in Cuba; that, too, it said, is to be considered first by the District judges.

The Court also declared that detainees do not have to go through the special civilian court review process that Congress created in 2005, since that is not an adequate substitute for habeas rights. The Court refused to interpret the Detainee Treatment Act — as the Bush Administration had suggested — to include enough legal protection to make it an adequate replacement for habeas. Congress, it concluded, unconstitutionally suspended the writ in enacting that Act.

If accurate, this is unprecedented.

We have just given the rights of US citizens to non-US citizens, and even more outrageous, we’ve given habeas corpus to enemy combatants captured in the field.

From this, two things might happen: a) We, as a sovereign nation, cannot enter into a war without a logistical fishtail of lawyers in train; and b) our troops would be less and less willing to capture prisoners, i.e. expect the kill rate of our enemies to dramatically rise. Those are the two possibilities I see just over our immediate horizon from this decision. Who knows the ripple effect it will have in the years to come.

God help us. It seems our own Supreme Court has, for all intents and purposes, actively curtailed the war-making ability of the United States.

This is not just a blow to the Bush Administration; this is a blow against the United States. If the rights of US citizens are to be granted foreign enemies, won’t the reverse be true? How long will it be when the U.N. Courts have jurisdiction over US citizens?

Mrs. Malkin reviews conservative reactions to this ruling here.

*** UPDATE 6/12/08 ***

Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia, said the words that will be sure to reverberate across the length of the country, “The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today. I dissent.”

Supreme Court, Chief Justice, John Roberts remarked of today’s ruling that we “lose a bit more control over the conduct of this Nation’s foreign policy to unelected, politically unaccountable judges.”

Will our court system become the American Brussels, where unelected, politically unaccountable lawyerly bureaucrats dictate policy to Americans in like manner to how Brussels dictate policy to Europe? Is this how the beast enters our door?

I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t read it…

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court rebuked the Bush administration Monday for its inaction on global warming in a decision that could lead to more fuel-efficient cars as early as next year.
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The court, in a 5-4 ruling in its first case on climate change, declared that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are air pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

The
Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regulate those emissions from new cars and trucks under the landmark environment law, and the “laundry list” of reasons it has given for declining to do so are insufficient, the court said.

“A reduction in domestic emissions would slow the pace of global emissions increases, no matter what happens elsewhere,” Justice John Paul Stevens said in the majority opinion. “EPA has offered no reasoned explanation for its refusal to decide whether greenhouse gases cause or contribute to climate change.” [emphasis is all mine]

You can read the rest here.

Apparently, in another gross incident in judicial activism, the Supreme Court is deciding the issue of Global Warming for the American people without their say so. Needless to say, this ruling comes at a devastating time for our domestic automakers who are already on the ropes. The imposition of more fuel and manufacturing regulations could possibly make the production of new vehicles more expensive for both the manufacturer and for the common man. As I noted in my previous post, environmentalism tends to be the luxury of the rich.

The good news in all this is that the good Court “did not specifically order the EPA to set mandatory limits but said the agency has not shown adequate reasons for declining to do so.” It would seem that this ruling basically provides the EPA with the teeth necessary act to reduce carbon emissions from cars and other vehicles but declines to tell the EPA what to do.

Writing for the Minority decision, Chief Justice Roberts wrote:

“Apparently dissatisfied with the pace of progress on this issue in the elected branches, petitioners have come to the courts claiming broad-ranging injury, and attempting to tie that injury to the government’s alleged failure to comply with a rather narrow statutory provision,” Roberts wrote.

He wrote his conclusion “involves no judgment on whether global warming exists, what causes it, or the extent of the problem.”

The American Republic is founded on the principle of self-government, for the people and by the people. Increasingly, however, we are discovering that we have “rulers”, men and women who deigns to make our decisions for us. Not only does this behavior betray their low opinion of the American people, it also undermines the principles upon which our nation was founded. When America was first formed under the Constitution, Europeans believed our nation would eventually fall because of the sheer “anarchy” of our freedom. We did not have aristocratic oligarchs presiding over us, but we ruled ourselves of our own initiatives. While it is true that we have always had a wealthy, educated class in government and business, there was always respect for “We the People”.

Perhaps it is precipitous for me to say so, but it seems to me that many of our Leftists and Right-wingers want to overturn the ideals of the American Revolution. The Leftists want reduce American into a pale copy of a dysfunctional, stymied Europe while they grab for total power. The Right-wingers want to impose their list of rules upon the American people and legislate American salvation. Both denies the will of the people they are supposedly serving. Both have little to no confidence in the wisdom of the American populace to decide their own fate.

The hope is that at some point the American people will shrug off these extremes. I believe it all depends on whether or not we receive a full-on Christian revival. That’s our hope.