Saturday, September 10, 2005
More on the U.S. Supreme Court
The U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled unanymously that the American government has the right to detain "enemy combatants" indefinitely, even if the combatant in question is a U.S. citizen captured on U.S. soil.
I, of course, no fuck-all about the relevant law in this case, so I'll confine my comments on it to the hackneyed old "if that's what the law says, then the law should be changed". Instead of dwelling on the correctness of the ruling, I'll draw your attention to the article's fourth paragraph (emphasis mine):
Now, let's play a little game: let's suppose that you're a judge who is considered a potential Supreme Court nominee, and a case comes before you in which the man responsible for nominating Supreme Court justices has a strong vested interest. Is this vested interest likely to make you more or less likely to rule the President's way?
This isn't, of course, some smug Canadian attempt to show how our judicial selection process is preferable, since our process, in the words of some noted legal scholar, "blows donkey chunks". Instead, it's evidence of why both countries need a broader selection process, sort of like the one that the Students' Union was on the verge of selecting for DIE Board before Abboud shot it all to hell on account of his Americophilia.
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The U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled unanymously that the American government has the right to detain "enemy combatants" indefinitely, even if the combatant in question is a U.S. citizen captured on U.S. soil.
I, of course, no fuck-all about the relevant law in this case, so I'll confine my comments on it to the hackneyed old "if that's what the law says, then the law should be changed". Instead of dwelling on the correctness of the ruling, I'll draw your attention to the article's fourth paragraph (emphasis mine):
But the court's ruling, written by Judge Michael Luttig, who is considered a potential Supreme Court nominee, said definitively that Mr Bush had been given such powers by the congressional declaration authorising military force following the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Now, let's play a little game: let's suppose that you're a judge who is considered a potential Supreme Court nominee, and a case comes before you in which the man responsible for nominating Supreme Court justices has a strong vested interest. Is this vested interest likely to make you more or less likely to rule the President's way?
This isn't, of course, some smug Canadian attempt to show how our judicial selection process is preferable, since our process, in the words of some noted legal scholar, "blows donkey chunks". Instead, it's evidence of why both countries need a broader selection process, sort of like the one that the Students' Union was on the verge of selecting for DIE Board before Abboud shot it all to hell on account of his Americophilia.
