Five Justices Bring Constitution Back to Life

Today the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the President and Congress can't turn on and off the Constitution at will, and that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay deserve the right of habeas corpus. More than 200 people have been held six years and have never been told why they're in prison. Lakhdar Boumediene, an Algerian who immigrated to Bosnia where he became a legal resident, was taken from his Bosnian home in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001. He gave name to this case, Boumediene v. Bush, which is one of the most important judicial decisions in my generation, and it was a sweeping ruling so it is unlikely the Bush administration will be able to set up a military prison camp elsewhere. We should learn quite a bit about the prisoners at Gitmo. I'm not saying any of them are innocent, but they might be, and all people certainly deserve a fair trial, or more importantly, this country and the victims of 9-11 deserve that these prisoners have a fair trial.

Justice Scalia went pretty far in his dissent. He wrote that the ruling “will almost certainly cause more Americans to get killed" and “The nation will live to regret what the court has done today." Well God knows how many thousands of Americans have been killed and how many millions of people in the world have lived to regret what Scalia and other justices did back in December of 2000 with Gore v. Bush.

Today, because of this decision, the world is a better place, and I believe that America just might be able to one day return to the moral high ground that lifted us to be the envy of most of the world.