Source: https://willworkforjustice.blogspot.com/2008/06/most-significant-us-supreme-court.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 13:12:24+00:00

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Most surprising is Justice Antonin Scalia’s switch-a-roo in Boumediene. As a so-called true conservative, he should have understood the overarching theme of the Constitution--that the Constitution limits the government’s actions and exists to hold government accountable to the public. As such, secretive criminal tribunals and detentions, like the one in Guantanamo Bay, directly contravene constitutional principles such as the separation of powers doctrine.
In fact, Justice Scalia had dealt with a somewhat similar issue in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, where his dissent was joined by the most liberal Justice on the bench, John Paul Stevens. Scalia even referred to his Hamdi opinion during the Bush oral argument. In an interesting slip, when Scalia demanded to know whether there was any precedent for extending constitutional habeas corpus to non-citizens, and the detainees’ counsel offered examples, Scalia said, “Okay, try them. I mean, line them up.” Somewhere in Scalia’s brain, he must have subconsciously understood that forcing a government to provide a speedy trial to all persons it detains on U.S. soil and/or under complete U.S. jurisdiction and control is an essential check on corruption and power.
In Hamdi, Justice Scalia advocated the most restrictive interpretation of the Executive’s power of detention. The other Justices said that so long as the government allowed some kind of process accompanying detention that provided for meaningful notice of the factual grounds for detention, and a meaningful opportunity to present evidence before a neutral tribunal with the assistance of counsel, the Court would defer to the Executive branch. Scalia, however, rejected this half-way measure (I call it “habeas corpus lite”) and said that the government had only two options when it detained Hamdi: a) either Congress had to suspend the right to habeas corpus, an option only in times of “invasion” or “rebellion,” or b) the government had to provide a normal, open criminal trial to Hamdi, a U.S. citizen. Scalia argued that the Court had no legal basis for telling the Executive or the Legislative branches how to establish new procedures in Hamdi’s situation; instead, the Court’s ambit was limited to declaring the government’s procedure unconstitutional and ordering Hamdi’s release, or declaring the government’s procedure constitutional. What is so stunning about Scalia's dissent is that it fails to realize that Kennedy is saying exactly what Scalia himself wrote in Hamdi, meaning that the logic is the same, and the difference is that one case dealt with a U.S. citizen while the other did not.
Usually, Scalia's unyielding type of interpretation--i.e., either the document says what it says, or it doesn’t, and it’s not my business to make up things I think it should say--gets Scalia points for his self-restraint. Indeed, this was Scalia’s time to shine, to show the public that his brand of interpretation may not be the most compassionate, but the one that could be counted on in hard times, when its unbending steel backbone would not melt under public pressure. In short, Scalia choked, and Justice Kennedy has an opinion that will shape his legacy in the years to come.
I met Justice Kennedy several years ago when I was a law school student. He is a tall, affable man with a distinguished but not standoffish demeanor. After his speech, he kindly signed my Constitutional Law textbook on the front inside cover. Before he signed the cover, he flipped through the book, trying to find one of his opinions. He saw none of his opinions had been published prominently and thus could not sign next to an opinion he had written. I am not sure whether he was looking for a particular case, but it was then that I realized Justice Kennedy was concerned about establishing a legacy and disappointed that his contributions to the Court were not as famous as some of his colleagues. For a moderate conservative, it was somewhat incongruent to hear him tell the audience that his favorite Justice was Justice Thurgood Marshall. But combine Kennedy's statement with his search for one of his opinions in my textbook, and you see that this is a man that wants a legacy. He now has it, and it’s a damn fine one. If you ever see him and want his autograph, flip to your Con Law book and present him with Boumediene v. Bush.
"Although the United States has maintained complete and uninterrupted control of Guantanamo for over 100 years, the Government’s view is that the Constitution has no effect there, at least as to noncitizens, because the United States disclaimed formal sovereignty in its 1903 lease with Cuba. The Nation’s basic charter cannot be contracted away like this. The Constitution grants Congress and the President the power to acquire, dispose of, and govern territory, not the power to decide when and where its terms apply. To hold that the political branches may switch the Constitution on or off at will would lead to a regime in which they, not this Court, say 'what the law is.' Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 177."
JUSTICE BREYER: On that question, suppose that you are from Bosnia, and you are held for six years in Guantanamo, and the charge is that you helped Al-Qaeda, and you had your hearing before the CSRT [Combatant Status Review Tribunal].
And now you go to the D.C. Circuit, and here is what you say: The CSRT is all wrong. Their procedures are terrible. But just for purposes of argument, I concede those procedures are wonderful, and I also conclude it reached a perfectly good result.
Okay? So you concede it for argument's sake. But what you want to say is: Judge, I don't care how good those procedures are. I'm from Bosnia. I've been here six years. The Constitution of the United States does not give anyone the right to hold me six years in Guantanamo without either charging me or releasing me, in the absence of some special procedure in Congress for preventive detention.
That's the argument I want to make. I don't see anything in this CSRT provision that permits me to make that argument. So I'm asking you: Where can you make that argument?
GENERAL CLEMENT: I'm not sure that he could make that argument.
Security subsists, too, in fidelity to freedom’s first principles. Chief among these are freedom from arbitrary and unlawful restraint and the personal liberty that is secured by adherence to the separation of powers...Because our Nation’s past military conflicts have been of limited duration, it has been possible to leave the outer boundaries of war powers undefined. If, as some fear, terrorism continues to pose dangerous threats to us for years to come, the Court might not have this luxury...[But] [t]he laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times. Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system they are reconciled within the framework of the law. The Framers decided that habeas corpus, a right of first importance, must be a part of that framework, a part of that law. pps. 68-70.
So Kennedy is telling Scalia to calm down--we can work through this, and if times change, the law and Americans can adapt.
We hold that those procedures are not an adequate and effective substitute for habeas corpus. Therefore §7 of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA), 28 U. S. C. A. §2241(e) (Supp. 2007), operates as an unconstitutional suspension of the writ. We do not address whether the President has authority to detain these petitioners nor do we hold that the writ must issue. These and other questions regarding the legality of the detention are to be resolved in the first instance by the District Court.
As the writers said of Magna Carta, “it means this, that the king is and shall be below the law.” 1 F. Pollock & F. Maitland, History of English Law 173 (2d ed. 1909); see also 2 Bracton On the Laws and Customs of England 33 (S. Thorne transl. 1968) (“The king must not be under man but under God and under the law, because law makes the king”).
Go back and read that paragraph again--if you truly understand it, you understand America and you understand its founding principles. It was about time that someone in another branch of government stood up to George W. Bush and his expansion of the Executive power. Reading the words above, knowing that they are now enshrined as the supreme law of this land, was almost worth the wait.
Because the Constitution’s separation-of-powers structure, like the substantive guarantees of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, see Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U. S. 356, 374 (1886), protects persons as well as citizens, foreign nationals who have the privilege of litigating in our courts can seek to enforce separation- of-powers principles, see, e.g., INS v. Chadha, 462 U. S. 919, 958–959 (1983).
Kennedy also indicates the Founders believed the writ of habeas corpus was designed to prevent "tyranny" and "arbitrary government." He cites Federalist No. 84.
The "We don't have de jure sovereignty over Cuba, so you're interfering in international affairs" argument is the government's weakest one, but had to made because its technical aspect appeals to lawyers. Still, the idea that the government's lawyers tried to rely on this weak argument probably upset the Court, leading to the following rebuke from Kennedy, where he says, "Our basic charter cannot be contracted away like this [through loopholes]."
In that one simple paragraph, Kennedy has responded to any who would dare say that he has made it difficult for the military to combat terrorism. Kennedy clearly thinks that this is a simple issue. And after you hear him explain it, it does sound simple: there are people being held someplace under the U.S.'s control; these people are not in the middle of a war zone; Cuba won't mind if we give these people a trial ("There is no indication, furthermore, that adjudicating a habeas corpus petition would cause friction with the host government." page 41); there is no threat to anyone if these people get a trial; habeas corpus is an essential Constitutional right; and by denying these persons a speedy trial, the executive branch is violating the Constitution.
While obligated to abide by the terms of the lease, the United States is, for all practical purposes, answerable to no other sovereign for its acts on the base. Were that not the case, or if the detention facility were located in an active theater of war, arguments that issuing the writ would be “impracticable or anomalous” would have more weight.
I interpret the above paragraph to indicate that the Constitution requires some form of trial within a reasonable time, but my reading may be reasonably disputed. Kennedy also allows another loophole--he reminds everyone that Congress, under the Suspension Clause, can suspend the writ of habeas corpus if it wants to do what it's doing now. Of course, the writ has been suspended only once in American history, during the Civil War (a "rebellion" or "invasion" is required).
So what's the real result of Justice Kennedy's decision? "To be continued..." by the other two branches and the will of the people. Kennedy's deference to the other two branches--within the reasonable framework set forth in his opinion--makes the dissenters' arguments sound hollow.
Today the Court strikes down as inadequate the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants. The political branches crafted these procedures amidst an ongoing military conflict, after much careful investigation and thorough debate. The Court rejects them today out of hand, without bothering to say what due process rights the detainees possess, without explaining how the statute fails to vindicate those rights, and before a single petitioner has even attempted to avail himself of the law’s operation. And to what effect? The majority merely replaces a review system designed by the people’s representatives with a set of shapeless procedures to be defined by federal courts at some future date.
Simply put, the Court’s opinion fails on its own terms. The majority strikes down the statute because it is not an “adequate substitute” for habeas review, ante, at 42, but fails to show what rights the detainees have that cannot be vindicated by the DTA system.
A second fact insufficiently appreciated by the dissents is the length of the disputed imprisonments, some of the prisoners represented here today having been locked up for six years...[I]t is enough to repeat that some of these petitioners have spent six years behind bars. After six years of sustained executive detentions in Guantanamo, subject to habeas jurisdiction but without any actual habeas scrutiny, today’s decision is no judicial victory, but an act of perseverance in trying to make habeas review, and the obligation of the courts to provide it, mean something of value both to prisoners and to the Nation.
After Kennedy's grand words, what it boils down to is the following: some Justices thought that Congress had acted with the appropriate urgency and crafted new legal systems in good faith to deal with captured combatants. Other Justices believed that the profound delay in trying the people held in Guantanamo Bay with appropriate safeguards proved that Congress was disrespecting a fundamental Constitutional right.
So who has won?...Not the Great Writ, whose majesty is hardly enhanced by its extension to a jurisdictionally quirky outpost, with no tangible benefit to anyone. Not the rule of law, unless by that is meant the rule of lawyers, who will now arguably have a greater role than military and intelligence officials in shaping policy for alien enemy combatants. And certainly not the American people, who today lose a bit more control over the conduct of this Nation’s foreign policy to unelected, politically unaccountable judges.
Justice Roberts' words sound like music to a libertarian's ears because they invoke the principle of self-restraint. But once you remember that the people in Guantanamo Bay had waited six years, and the D.C. Circuit court judges had basically denied them due process for those six years while also accepting a non-adversarial, closed trial system as sufficient, Justice Roberts sounds unconscionably naive.
There is a time and place for the Supreme Court to intervene in politically charged issues. When the Executive and Legislative branches are violating the Constitution by enacting into law and then enforcing kangaroo courts and Kafkaesque tribunals, the Court's intervention was justified.
America is at war with radical Islamists. The enemy began by killing Americans and American allies abroad: 241 at the Marine barracks in Lebanon, 19 at the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, 224 at our embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, and 17 on the USS Cole in Yemen...The game of bait-and-switch that today’s opinion plays upon the Nation’s Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.
Had the law been otherwise, the military surely would not have transported prisoners there [Guantanamo Bay], but would have kept them in Afghanistan, transferred them to another of our foreign military bases, or turned them over to allies for detention.
What competence does the Court have to second-guess the judgment of Congress and the President on such a point? None whatever. But the Court blunders in nonetheless. Henceforth, as today’s opinion makes unnervingly clear, how to handle enemy prisoners in this war will ultimately lie with the branch that knows least about the national security concerns that the subject entails.
This echoes Roberts' comments that the Court's decision seems politically motivated, i.e. intended to increase the power of the judiciary rather than complying with common sense. However, as I said before, there is a time and place for court intervention, and six years of detention based on secret evidence seems like a reasonable time to intervene. No dissenter mentions this simple fact: that had the Executive and Legislative branches worked together to provide an adequately adversarial legal system within a reasonable time to the detainees, all issues before the Supreme Court would have been moot. The inaction of the other branches, not some plot to increase judicial power, is what allowed Justice Kennedy to finally have his legacy.
The case before the court dealt with Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution, not the Bill of Rights. The specific clause is as follows: "Clause 2: 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."
It's interesting that Scalia, of all people, would be reading something (i.e., a citizenship requirement for due process) into the Constitution that isn't supported by the four corners of the document. Also, as all lawyers know, "shall means shall." Article I is very straightforward--it states that habeas corpus "shall" not be suspended except in two scenarios. What makes the Supreme Court's ruling confusing is that no Justice really defines whether 9/11 constitutes an invasion or rebellion, and if so, who has the authority to determine whether an "invasion" has occurred. The Supreme Court bypassed the issue of providing guidance on what constitutes a "rebellion" and "invasion," because Congress is the entity with the power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, and because it had not done so, that specific issue was not before the Court.
Senator Barack Obama praised the ruling as "an important step toward re-establishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law, and rejecting a false choice between terrorism and respecting habeas corpus." I'm with Obama--and apparently, the four corners of the Constitution--on this one.
1. I don't think the Court has ever held that the full panoply of the Bill of Rights applies to noncitizens held outside the United States, particularly in the context of hostilities towards the U.S. Indeed, Hamdi seemed to hold otherwise. So that might explain the 6th Amendment issue.
2. Remember that Congress has NOT suspended the writ. So the question of whether we have had an "invasion" to threaten "public safety" is not yet relevant, at least legally. The issues were (1) whether the detainees could invoke the protection of the Suspension Clause, and (2) whether the MCA and DTA procedures were an adequate substitute for habeas. And the answers were (1) yes and (2) no, respectively.
3. I think Scalia has been consistent on this point. I think he has consistently stated that the writ does not extend to noncitizens held outside the United States. Notice, also, that the Suspension Clause says nothing about "persons" or "citizens." So, for Scalia, it is a question of what the common law required in 1789.
I loved this ruling - but loved listening to the oral submissions even better. Seth Waxman is pure class.
Obviously, the law, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Someone's law will apply. But you can't blame Gen Clement, I suppose - as he was left carrying the ill conceived Alberto Gonzalez & John Yoo can.

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