The Rude Pundit: Antonin Scalia Says Gitmo Detainees Can Suck His Gavel

[meegbear]

In one of several surprisingly civilized recent decisions, today the Supreme Court released its 5-4 opinion that detainees held at Guantanamo Bay have the right to challenge their imprisonment in civilian court, and that if the Congress wants to take away the writ of habeas corpus from anyone, then it better fuckin' stand up and say, as the Constitution does, that we're in a "case of rebellion or invasion." In his raised middle finger of a majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy writes of things like Military Detainee Act, the Congress and the President do not "have the power to switch the Constitution on or off at will."

The majority decision (on quick read) is compelling. For real fun, though, let's take a trip into the mad brain of Justice Antonin Scalia, the man whose consistent belief that individual liberties and civil rights are merely the dried ejaculate of the unending masturbation of self-indulgent adolescents has made him the model judge for John McCain and other corporate and imperial power-lovin' whores. In his separate dissent today, Scalia managed to reduce the role of the judiciary to a mere foreskin on the cock of presidential power and the Constitution to so much shit-smeared Charmin spinning into the maelstrom of the American toilet.

Let the man himself speak. First, he gives a mini-version of a Bush or Cheney speech, or one of his own, being the Justice who loves that speaker's fee lucre more than any other: "America is at war with radical Islamists. The enemy began by killing Americans and American allies abroad: 241 at the Marine barracks in Lebanon, 19 at the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, 224 at our embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, and 17 on the USS Cole in Yemen...On September 11, 2001, the enemy brought the battle to American soil, killing 2,749 at the Twin Towers in New York City, 184 at the Pentagon in Washington, D. C., and 40 in Pennsylvania. It has threatened further attacks against our homeland; one need only walk about buttressed and barricaded Washington, or board a plane anywhere in the country, to know that the threat is a serious one. Our Armed Forces are now in the field against the enemy, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Last week, 13 of our countrymen in arms were killed." And what better way to deal with the 1983 Beirut bombing than to deny habeas corpus to Afghanis captured in 2001?

Then Big Tony kicks out the imperial presidency jams: "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." If you're a federal judge in a civilian court today, you must feel goddamn proud that Antonin Scalia has such faith in your ability to hold trials for "enemy combatants."

Essentially, as much of the rest of the dissent says, you suck, judiciary branch. It's the kind of self-loathing that has gotten Scalia so chummy with Dick Cheney, where he lets Cheney play "Shoot Scalia in the Face," except with, you know, his dick instead of a rifle. Indeed, Scalia pretty much says the judiciary sucks in one of his last lines: "And, most tragically, it sets our military commanders the impossible task of proving to a civilian court, under whatever standards this Court devises in the future, that evidence supports the confinement of each and every enemy prisoner." Man, what a punk-ass legal system this nation has, demanding that the government prove that an accused criminal is a criminal. What pussies we must be not to just trust the executive branch (and the military) with that. Of course, that'd be called a "dictatorship," but, hell, as long as Scalia is kept fat with linguine and oh-so-yummy sausages, what the fuck does he care.

And what of the logic of Scalia's arguments? He says, among other things, that habeas corpus protections in the Constitution were never meant to extend beyond the borders of the United States, citing English and Scottish precedents (which is odd in itself, since Scalia huffed and wheezed when other justices used the legal arguments of foreign countries to support their decisions). Which begs the question: if the United States Constitution doesn't apply at Gitmo, does Cuba's? No one's? It's like tying your leather slave to the iron posts of the bed and after you put the ball gag in, you tell him there's no safe word this time as you start to put the Ben-Gay on his ass cheeks. (Anthony Kennedy addresses this remarkable Cuban conundrum in the majority opinion, 'round about pages 35-42.)

Finally, there's the couple of instances where Scalia comes across like a blogger who has run out of ways to say shit. For instance, here's an actual quote from this actual Supreme Court Justice: "(S)o long as there are some places to which habeas does not run—so long as the Court’s new 'functional' test will not be satisfied in every case—then there will be circumstances in which 'it would be possible for the political branches to govern without legal constraint.' Or, to put it more impartially, areas in which the legal determinations of the other branches will be (shudder!) supreme." That "shudder!" is now part of the written history of the highest court in the United States.

Instead of worrying about impeaching George W. Bush (save it for arrest as a war criminal), who only has a few more months to fuck us up, what about Scalia, who may have years more to poison our well? Putting more justices on the Supreme Court like Antonin Scalia would be like pouring scorpions into a playpen.

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/

[pleah]

1. I may be wrong, but I think most people know Scalia is a nut.

Can a justice be removed if he is found legally insane?

[OwnedByFerrets]

2. Thom Hartmann just discussed the possibility

of impeaching Supreme Court Justices. He said that they have to be guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors and that Bush vs Gore was the only thing that fit that description. And that it has to be done in the same way that impeachment of the president is handled. Which is to say, it ain't gonna happen.