Saturday, June 14, 2008

Rights? These people have RIGHTS? When did THAT happen?


Blogging Tory "Prairie Tory" is some kind of pissed:

SCOTUS extends Habeas Corpus to unlawful combatants at Gitmo.

Wow. This decision came down the day before yesterday, and I'm stunned. I would expect a decision like this from our own SCC. I didn't expect this kind of activism from the SCOTUS.

Yeah ... goddamned judicial activists, getting all "basic rights" this and "habeas corpus" that. It's at the point where you can't even establish an offshore, legally-inaccessible gulag anymore where you can incarcerate people indefinitely and torture them without ever bringing charges against them or anything.

What the fuck is this world coming to?

AFTERSNARK: Shorter Bush administration: "Yeah, whatever."

4 comments:

Dr.Dawg said...

President Bush said Thursday he would abide by the decision

Gee, how Constitutional of him.

As for Prairie Tory, he oughtta realize that the SCOTUS decision was more strict constructionist than activist. Habeus corpus has its own section of the Constitution:

Article I, Section 9: "the privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."

Yet here is the logic of the Right, in the form of a declaration by the now-disgraced Alberto Gonzales:

There is no expressed grant of habeas in the Constitution; there's a prohibition against taking it away.

Good Christ on a pike. Only Prairie Tory and his political co-religionists could make sense of that.

Ti-Guy said...

What the hell has happened on the prairies? It used to be populated by plain-speaking, clear-thinking pragmatists who, one would think, would never bother considering the restoration of habeas corpus as activism, regardless of whatever other argument/sophistry/delusion they're willing to entertain to support its suspension.

They're really making intellectual dishonesty déclassé for academics, pundits and courtiers.

mikmik said...

Same old, same old. A ruling goes against what the 'tortue and then execute' and the first thing out of their mouths is "activist judges."
It is ALWAYS red herring and slander in responce to anything these neo-wankers don't like.

Dana Hunter said...

I think our entire right wing needs to be institutionalized. The reaction to a simple ruling, affirming a right enshrined in the body of the Constitution, going all the way back through hundreds of years of jurisprudence, is psychotic even for them. I keep telling myself not to ask how crazy these idiots can get - I know I really don't want to know the answer.