Tell them they don’t have any right to judge the POTUS



During the March 28 oral arguments in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, there were two main issues: the constitutional legitimacy of the military commissions at Guantánamo, created solely by the president, and whether the Supreme Court itself had the right to even hear the case.

In a revealing exchange, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said to Solicitor General Paul Clement: “I thought it was the government position that these enemy combatants do not have any rights under the Constitution and laws of the United States.”

“That is true, Justice Ginsburg,” the solicitor general said. The unmistakable subtext of the government’s answer was: “So why is this court interfering with the inherent constitutional powers of the commander in chief in the war on terrorism? Get lost!”

This dismissal of the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction by the administration angered at least five of the justices in that hearing during a series of hostile questions to Clement. Among the five, most significantly, was Anthony Kennedy, who increasingly appears to be the Sandra Day O’Connor of this Supreme Court—a more or less conservative swing vote.

is this the Bush burning to ashes?