Let’s hear it for the rule of law!!!

Today’s Supreme Court decisions on Padilla, Hamdi, and Rasul (the latter being the Gitmo case) are great news for all those of us who believe that women and men are better ruled by laws than by autocratic and idiosyncratic individuals.
Thank you, the Supremes!!!!
I found a great new blog today, SCOTUSblog, as in the Supreme Court of the US. It seems to be written by a group of close and well-informed SCOTUS watchers.
I’m not going to duplicate the great posts they’ve put up there today. I just wanted to highlight a few quotes they had picked out from the various opinions written by different Supremes on these cases.
First this, Justice Stevens writing for (sadly) a minority group of four justices who failed to persuade the majority that the Court should indeed take up Padilla’s case as brought:

At stake in this case is nothing less than the essence of a free society. . . . Unconstrained Executive detention for the purpose of investigating and preventing subversive activity is the hallmark of the Star Chamber.

As I said, that group didn’t win a majority in the case of Rumsfeld v. Padilla (a case that had been brought by Rumsfeld in response to an earlier case against His Rummyship by the poor, long-detained US citizen Jose Padilla.) But what the majority did say was merely that Rumsfeld had been the wrong address for Padilla’s original suit.
They said Padilla should have brought it instead against the commander of the navy brig in South Carolina where he has been held for 814 days now. Also, from what they had ruled in the case of the habeas petition brought by another US citizen, Yaser Hamdi, for which apparently His Rummyship was “the right address”, was that a US citizen–even one alleged to be an enemy combatant– does have the right to petition US courts against his detention.
(Thanks to George Paine of Warblogging.com for having kept a “Padilla watch” day counter on his site for many of those 814 days.)
In this SCOTUSblog post, Lyle Denniston writes:

The Supreme Court’s first review of the Bush administration’s handling of the war on terrorism may force a fundamental reordering of constitutional priorities, especially in the way the government may deal with individuals caught up in that war. Amid all the writing by the Justices in today’s three historic rulings, no sentence stands out as vividly as this one, “A state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation’s citizens.”

It’s not quite clear which of today’s decisions that quote was a part of.
Here is Denniston’s summary of the results of today’s three decisions:

Here, in summary, is a first look at a new constitutional order that may arise from the new decisions:
1. In general, the courts are open and functioning, and they will insist upon a full partnership in judging the constitutional necessity of wartime actions that affect individuals – citizens and, sometimes, foreign nationals, too.
2. Congress would be constitutionally entitled to exercise a fuller role, if it were so inclined, as a co-manager of the war when that conflict impacts individual rights.
3. Citizens – even those deemed to be terrorist suspects – can no longer be detained indefinitely and without any rights that the Pentagon does not want them to have.
4. Even foreign nationals rounded up and placed at an offshore Navy base – in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – are constitutionally entitled to contest their detention, perhaps even when that might interfere with military interrogation of them, seeking to gain intelligence information.
In historic terms, the new rulings are at least as serious a setback as the Executive branch suffered in 1952 when the Court, in the midst of the Korean War, struck down President Truman’s seizure of U.S. steel mills to keep them open to produce war materiel. (Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer)
“History and common sense,” the Court said today, “teach us that an unchecked system of detention carries the potential to become a means of oppression and abuse of others who do not present. . .an immediate threat.”

From my own quick skimming of some of the lengthy opinions rendered today, I’d say that there was a lot of very welcome emphasis in them on the centrality of the powers of habeas corpus (literally, “that you may have control of your own body”; and therefore that the government doesn’t get to incarcerate you lightly) to the whole experience and practice of democracy as it has evolved in the common-law nations.
Sometime, I have to say, I am both pleased that I’m a US citizen and proud that I am one. I haven’t had such a day for a very long time now… But today is such a day. “A state of war is not a blank check for the President … ” Indeed.