Abstract

Healing the Law

The article looks at two U.S. Supreme Court decisions during the President George W. Bush Administration. The Supreme Court of the United States has had two historic encounters with President George W. Bush. The first was its decision to stop the recount of the presidential vote in Florida in December 2000 and, in effect, to put Bush in the White House. The second was the series of decisions rendered in June 2004 in the cases regarding the detainees in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and the two American citizens being held as "enemy combatants." Some 673 law professors from 173 law schools signed a statement asserting that "by stopping the vote count in Florida, the U.S. Supreme Court used its power to act as political partisans, not as judges of a court of law." If the policies of the Bush Administration have exhibited any one constant theme, it has been contempt, in domestic as well as foreign affairs, for law. In the period of the Iraq war, other checks and balances provided in the constitutional system had failed: Congress surrendered its war power to the President, and the press, taken as a whole, had become a cheering section for the war. In 2004, the Court delivered a firm rebuke to the Administration's imperial conception of the law. It required detainees to have some chance to show their innocence in a judicial forum. But more important than the substance of the decisions and the opinions was the fact of a clear, strong, effective rebuff on the otherwise unconstrained growth of presidential power.