Saturday, July 01, 2006

Supreme Court Gito Decision

I believe the Supreme Court made a bad decision the other. My views are sumed up pretty good in this article at RealClearPolitics. The jest of it is in these 3 paragraphs:

There you have it. We can now turn to international common law to find out what our laws require. Who better than the Iraqis and North Koreans, Khaddafi's Libya, Mugabe's Zimbabwe and Chavez's Venezuela to tell us what our laws command? That's the Court's reading of the law. To make matters worse, by making Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions (the linchpin of this analysis) both legally enforceable and dependent on international common law, the Court has opened a door to criminal liability for American citizens, soldiers, and government officials on terms we cannot predict and would never approve.

The President may not have made perfect choices on the procedures used for these trials. He may not have perfectly balanced concerns over fair process with concerns over national security. But the President, not the Court, has expertise on this subject.

Justice Breyer's concurrence says that Congress didn't give the President a blank check to fight the war on terror. But the Constitution also doesn't give the justices a blank check to write the law. It especially doesn't give them a check drawn on a foreign bank.


posted by David at 3:48 AM :: Permalink ::

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