SCOTUS Gets It Right!

The U.S. Supreme Court got it right! They finally shot the Bush regime in the foot and tore a gaping hole in the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA). The privilege of habeas corpus is back! That is your ability to ask why you have been arrested or detained and what charges are you being held on.

This case involved the "terrorist, radical, assassins, Islamic, extremist, bad people" and a gazillion other terms McCain, Obama and the American press have use to describe the detainees in Guantanamo. And most haven't been charged with a damn thing! But under some terms of the PATRIOT Act, with the help of a "bad" neighbor or coworker or employer or maybe no one at all, these detainees and even you too could be investigated for terror activity, accused of nothing, detained indefinitely for being a terrorist. And it is under those conditions that you could have been detained indefinitely without charge as long as the writ of habea corpus was under suspension.

Five of the nine US Supreme Court justices remembered their oath to uphold the Constitution. However, we need to be ever-wary about the Supreme Court because the very five who were in accordance with the Constitution are also the 5 elders among the panel.

On the other hand, the four dissenters - Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito, among the youngest members, and who followed right in lockstep with the jack booted Bush regime with their further scathing ramblings of "the war on terror".

If we can all agree that the Constitution is still breathing a little, that it is still the Law of this land, then here is a simple test. Read through the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights and find out how many times a requirement of citizenship is made. You should find that ONLY as a prerequisite to holding a position as U.S. president, congressmen, senator. Otherwise, rights and the privilege of habeas corpus are held by the People, who need not be Citizens at all.

Now we could argue that "in time of war" we may not necessarily have to allow the privilege of habeas corpus or the Fifth Amendment but that was not firmly declared. Therefore even "we the people" would have a problem if the government chose to hold us for any reason or no reason. (SIDE NOTE: I submit to you that we are where we are because we have trusted our government to do only the right and virtuous things way too long and did not insist on checking their work and demanding a strict adherence to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights over the past one hundred years.) We may not like the detainees or what we think they may have done to us but the supreme law must still prevail. We could always amend the Constitution but until that day, if "We the People" want the privilege of habeas corpus then we must extend it to the detainees as the Constitution requires.

Thank God the five got it right but still it is bothersome that we as a free nation have gone so far downhill so fast that we can hardly see, let alone know and remember the organic law of the land. We were only one vote away from losing this must-have privilege perhaps for forever!

But that's just my opinion and I for one am happy as can be that SCOTUS got it right for all of us today!