U.S. Supreme Court no longer 'supreme'
From the it-could-happen-here department
It grieves me to think that three decades in this body that I stand here in the Senate, knowing that weâre thinking of doing this. It is so wrong. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American. It is designed to ensure the Bush-Cheney administration will never again be embarrassed by a United States Supreme Court decision reviewing its unlawful abuses of power. The Supreme Court said, âYou abused your power.â He said, âHa, weâll fix that. We have a rubber stamp, a rubber stamp, Congress, that will just set that aside and give us power that nobody, no king or anybody else set foot in this land, ever thought of having.â Senator Patrick Leahy, Vermont (D)
The senator is referring to the slightly watered down but still dangerous detainee bill George W. Bush pushed through Congress. This bill has effectively nullified almost four centuries of legal protection for individuals against illegal arrest and detention by the state – the writ of habeas corpus.
With origins dating back to the development of the Magna Carta, and first explicitly codified as British common law in 1679, the writ of habeas corpus is a key protection that all common law states adhere to. The law establishes that the courts have the right to have brought before them persons unlawfully detained – its a key limit on the power of the state (then, a king).
What the U.S. Congress has just done is given the President, via his authority over the military, complete judicial control of the country, if he so deems. In effect this bill has gone against the constitution of the United States, in that it says the Supreme Court is no longer the supreme court of the land and that persons may not enjoy the protection of the supreme or any court of the land.
Simply put: any person detained by the U.S. – inside or outside the country – can be shipped off to a military prison in Guantanamo Bay, forever – and there is not a single thing that any court in the land can do to intervene, no matter what the circumstances.
Troublesome? Just ask Maher Arar.