The Devil and the law....

[pat]

Adventus has a really good post about the law, and the protection it affords us. It's a nice accompaniment to pecunium's post from a while back about habeas corpus.

At the end, RMJ points out "The Supreme Court ruled in 2004 that Guantanamo detainees are entitled to hearings. In 2006, those same detainees are still on hunger strikes to protest their incarceration, and are being treated in brutal and inhumane ways, in violation of international law as well as U.S. law. And yet that treatment continues."

This is true -- every time the SCOTUS has told the Administration the have to do something, they have stonewalled, and gone back to court to argue over what it really means, anything rather than provide hearings for these people. And I'm beginning to wonder...

What do we do if, when the cases finally reach the SCOTUS the second time around, and the court unequivocally says you have to provide hearings and these are what they are to look like and this is when they have to happen... what if the Administration flat out refuses?

Of course, by virtue of stonewalling, they will have waited until they could change the composition of the court, so it probably won't happen. That's why Alito matters so much: O'Connor wrote the majority in Hamdan which required the Administration to provide the detainees with due process.

But still, what happens when they finally push things too far, and the Court stands up and says, "No more"? What then?

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

I suspect it will be Andrew Jackson all over again. Mister Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.

[patgreene.livejournal.com]

I know. I shudder at that. I weep to think that there will be no massive outcry, either -- because I suspect there would not be.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

I doubt you'll even see the Cherokee people objecting very much.

[patgreene.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you're right. I'm sure if Korematsu had won his case and FDR had refused to release him, there would not have been a groudswell of opposition there, either.

Which brings me back to the question I keep thinking about a lot lately. Who have we become, as a people?

I know, every time a Republican ends up in the White House, people on the far left end of the spectrum blather about the republic falling. I've never felt that. Even when GW was elected -- and even as recently as 2004, when he was reelected -- I thought, as bad as it was, the country would survive.

I've never been ashamed of being an American, before. Never. I have disagreed with my country and with my government but I have never been ashamed of them. I am now. I have never been reluctant about speaking my mind -- as I am sometimes when I visit relatives in the South -- not so much out of fear of physical violence as the sort of nastiness that it is perfectly acceptable to lob at people with my political views these days. I still do, but I think first -- do I *need* to say something here? The sort of casualness with which I would discuss politics as little as two or three years ago is gone.

We will survive. We survived the Trail of Tears; slavery, Civil War and Reconstruction; and the internments; and McCarthy. And maybe one day this will be just another really sordid little episode in American history textbooks.

God, I hope so.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

I hope so too Pat.

I think the key to the current sorry state of the nation is association, or the lack thereof.

Overall, we're increasingly isolated from people with different attitudes, values and beliefs. Suburbanites fear to go into the cities, and city dwellers don't trust the people from the suburbs who don't understand them and their problems. There's a whole lot of distrust going around, and the people who drive wedges into the social fabric to win votes are benefiting from the overall lack of association ourside of insular groups.

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

There would be appeals to 'democracy' against 'judicial activism' and it would be ignored, or at best tied up in more procedural delays.

It would be nice if SCOTUS could find the president in contempt and have him sent to prison until he complied, but that's not going to happen.

[calebbullen.livejournal.com]

I think that the harder things get pushed in either direction in this country, the faster they snap back once things go too far. If the 2006 elections don't look like things moving back, I'll start despairing. Till then, it seems like the so called republican base is eroding faster and faster between the plame case, the abramov case, illegal wiretapping, DeLay and Ney stepping down, and at least our local republicans are starting to distance themselves from opinions they held firm to a year ago when the Bush administration seemed unstoppable. It's not going to be a sudden wakeup call where everyone goes, "Holy crap! what were we thinking?!?" but it seems like since Katrina, they've lost more ground than they've gained.

Heck Bush has even apologized a little bit and he gave in on the McCain torture bill... kind of.

Just keep on letting your representatives know that you support them or why you don't and urge everyone you know to as well. And spread the word on things that you don't see getting the news attention they deserve.

I mean even if that's all in folly, what else can one do?