I love Dahlia Lithwick. (You can see all her Slate columns here – I have it bookmarked so I can see whenever she has a new one.) Today she provides an entertaining summary of yesterday’s Supreme Court arguments in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Apparently Justice Souter got uncharacteristically angry. As for another justice, Lithwick writes, “What the hell has gotten into Justice Antonin Scalia? Between his extracurricular pronouncements on the arguments in this case (and I urge you to listen to the whole speech yourself) and his extracurricular hand signals last weekend, nobody is quite sure what has come over the man. He is ever more the Bill O’Reilly of the High Court.”
As for the case itself, the issue is (1) the legality of military tribunals set up by the executive branch that it claims are justified by “the war on terror,” and (2) whether the Court is even allowed to hear the case at all, because after the Court granted review of the case, Congress passed a law removing the issue from the Court’s jurisdiction. But (and I don’t know if I totally have this right) because the issue involved habeas corpus, the right of an arrestee to challenge his/her detention, it’s not clear whether Congress was allowed to strip the Court’s jurisdiction in the way it did.
I’m kind of confused here. I guess I would be less confused if I read the briefs. But who has time?
What’s to be confused about? Dahlia summarizes it nicely: “This war is like every other war except to the extent that it differs from those other wars. We follow the laws of war except to the extent that they do not apply to us. These prisoners have all the rights to which they are entitled by law, except to the extent that we have changed the law to limit their rights.”
No, no, no. I’m confused about the facts behind the case.