Anthony Kennedy has made his decision, now let him enforce it!

By Mike DeVine, Legal Editor for The Minority Report and The HinzSight Report

Today’s infamous 5-4 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court granting terrorists the right to an O.J. trial in U.S. civilian courts cries out for the present Chief Executive to so paraphrase Old Hickory’s similar defiance of John Marshall 176 years ago with respect to removal of the Cherokee from Georgia.

“John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”

The nation survived President Andrew Jackson’s defense of his constitutional executive powers against the first Judicial Oligarch. Should President Bush succumb to Justice Kennedy’s attempted coup to assume the role of Commander in Chief, it will be much harder for our nation to survive, much less thrive, as it has since 1832.

The ruling granting illegal enemy combatants held at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba stands millenia of war law, America military history from George Washington forward, the Geneva Convention, and, common sense on their heads.

The people being held at Gitmo are illegal enemy combatants as opposed to legal POWs. The court waxes ad nauseum about the irrelevance of the fact that the base is not on America soil. I agree. We held hundreds of thousands of legal Japanese and German POWs in the Lower Forty-Eight during WWII, and none were allowed access to U.S. courts.

The court speaks of the length of the “open-ended” detentions. But no one knew in 1944 that WWII would not last as long as the Thirty Years War or the even longer Peloponnesian Wars in Europe in earlier centuries. Thucydides, the author of the acclaimed history of the latter was himself a prisoner of war for much longer than the first terrorist admitted to Gitmo.

Captured combatants are held until the end of the conflict so as to prevent them from returning to the battlefield (see New York, Afghanistan or Iraq). Additionally, they may be charged with war crimes and serve a prison term or be executed. Even in the latter case, such trials have always been held by military tribunals, beginning under General Washington in 1776.

General Washington also not infrequently applied the war law that has always allowed illegal enemy combatants operating among civilian populations to be shot on site or summarily executed.

One of the main purposes of the Geneva Conventions was to discourage operations among civilians by granting rights to legal POWs, specifically denying same to terrorists.

The fact is that when a nation wages war, the Commander in Chief gathers intel on and directs operations against the enemy. He does not ask a court’s permission to target and kill particular combatants.

The Constitution was a compromise weighing rights of personal freedom and security between the police and the citizenry. Its application to enemies of the State is an abomination, and one that President Bush is duty bound to defy in order to uphold his Oath.

Supreme Court justices are not the only ones to take oaths to uphold the Constitution and they are not the final arbiters of same. We the People are.

President Bush, be one man with courage and you will make a majority. Lay down the gauntlet for the Dem Congress to impeach you so Osama bin Laden’s chauffeur can be tried in front of Judge Ito like a former Avis commercial and Buffalo Bills star turned murderer.

I have no doubt they will blink on that, just as they have on owning defeat since the November 2006 election. They won Congress but haven’t had the guts to de-fund the troops. Think they want people that would cut off their heads with machetes to be released by their liberal judges?

I don’t. They refuse to own defeat. You must not surrender to five lawyers.

For complete majority and dissenting opinion texts go here.

Scalia said the nation is “at war with radical Islamists” and that the court’s decision “will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.”

Heed Scalia’s words President Bush and follow Andy Jackson’s lead.

More later on other issues addressed in the Court’s opinions. But the main issue at hand is not the dicta of would be General Kennedy. Rather, it is the resolve of one man, i.e. the guy we elected twice to defend us, which he has done magnificently since 911, no thanks to five lawyers in robes.

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer columns The Minority Report and The HinzSight Report Race 4 2008 “One man with courage makes a majority.” - Andrew Jackson

[In addition to his corporate work in Atlanta, from 2001-2006, he was the Legal Editor and “conservative voice” of The Champion (Decatur, GA) newspaper, (legal organ for DeKalb County in Metro-Atlanta), where he was the one of first columnists in the nation, soon after September 11, 2001, to comment on the likelihood that captured terrorists in Afghanistan would be deemed to be illegal enemy combatants not entitled to Prisoner of War status under the laws of war.]