The dissents in
Boumediene are pretty scathing. Here's Roberts:
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. One cannot help but think, after surveying the modest
practical results of the majority's ambitious opinion, that this
decision is not really about the detainees at all, but about
control of federal policy regarding enemy combatants.
And Scalia:
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.
That consequence would be tolerable if necessary to preserve a
time-honored legal principle vital to our constitutional Republic.
But it is this Court's blatant abandonment of such a
principle that produces the decision today.
I'll probably have more to say once I've read the opinions a little
more closely.
topics:
Constitution, Law, Military
