15 June 2008

Saving the nation (and the world from judicial activism)

I am certain that true conservative Americans will be rejoicing the recent US Supreme Court ruling in the case of Boumediene v. Bush in which Justices Kennedy (app. R. Reagan), Stevens (app. G. Ford), Souter (app. Bush the Father), Ginsburg (app. W. Clinton) and Breyer (app. W. Clinton) preserved the ancient right of habeas corpus, a right so sacrosanct and universal that the Founders found no need to include it in the Bill of Rights* or the Constitution proper except to state the circumstances under which it could be suspended. These brave men and woman held fast against the onslaught of the activist judges Roberts (app. Bush the Son), Scalia (app. R. Reagan), Thomas (app. Bush the Father) and Alito (Bush the Son) who wished to invent new law from the ether simply to satisfy circumstance that they see in the world today. The thinking and arguments of these four vile men should be, and I am certain is, anathema to any conservative anywhere.

It is also possible that I could be wrong in this and that this carefully crafted conservative legal philosophy is only followed as long as convenient. Hard to tell.

*Should you not believe Mr. Dean or myself I give you the following from Federalist Paper (84):

"It may well be a question, whether these are not, upon the whole, of equal importance with any which are to be found in the constitution of this State. The establishment of the writ of habeas corpus, the prohibition of ex post facto laws, and of TITLES OF NOBILITY, to which we have no corresponding provision in our Constitution, are perhaps greater securities to liberty and republicanism than any it contains. The creation of crimes after the commission of the fact, or, in other words, the subjecting of men to punishment for things which, when they were done, were breaches of no law, and the practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny. The observations of the judicious Blackstone, in reference to the latter, are well worthy of recital: 'To bereave a man of life, [says he] or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole nation; but confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government.' And as a remedy for this fatal evil he is everywhere peculiarly emphatical in his encomiums on the habeas corpus act, which in one place he calls 'the BULWARK of the British Constitution.'"

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