Silver Lining

I will say this about the Bush Administration: it will give constitutional scholars decades of analysis and review to contend with.

Case in point: the recent ruling on the detainees at Gitmo. Since my job doesn't pay me to read Supreme Court opinions (a fact I am both grateful for and a little disappointed about), I've only read the press coverage.

What's interesting is in reading everything about this case--and all the past cases the Supremes have had to deal with in the last 5 years or so--is how much each case touches upon tenets of law that, until Bush came into power, most people really didn't argue about anymore.

Wait, did I say "interesting"? I meant sad. Sad because things like habeus corpus and the right to due process are bedrocks of our entire legal system, and weren't being argued about very often for good reason. Of course, a good rehashing of old Constitutional stalwarts isn't harmful, but when the justices come down with the slimmest of majorities available, it's frightening.

It's really as if someone managed to get a run-of-the-mill 1st Amendment issue all the way to the Supreme Court (run-of-the-mill meaning no obvious exceptions, no child pornography, just a guy making a newsletter or something) and then the judges only barely upheld the Amendment.

"Do people detained by American personnel on American soil deserve due process?" is such a stupid question it wouldn't have appeared on any law school exams until now. Now, thanks to Bush, maybe people don't actually deserve their day in court! Maybe they don't have a right to an attorney, and hey, what's the deal with "innocent until proven guilty"? That's always in the way, man!

Scalia is a hack. I respected him (even while vehemently disagreeing) up until this ruling. That's over.