Court makes itself an issue in campaign

NY Times:

Thanks in no small part to Justice Antonin Scalia’s dire warning that granting Guantánamo detainees access to habeas corpus “will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed,” the Supreme Court finds itself on the verge of becoming something that it has not been for many election cycles — a campaign issue.

Senator John McCain, the presumed Republican presidential nominee, opened a town-hall-style meeting in New Jersey on Friday morning by telling the crowd of 1,500 people that the Supreme Court “rendered a decision yesterday that I think is one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”

Mr. McCain’s initial response to the court’s 5-to-4 ruling in Boumediene v. Bush had been considerably milder. The decision “obviously concerns me,” he said on Thursday afternoon.

But overnight, the prospect of using the decision as a rallying point seemed to occur to many conservatives simultaneously. The ruling has “teed up the Supreme Court issue nicely for the G.O.P.,” Curt Levey of the Committee for Justice, a group that advocates for Republican judicial nominees, wrote on his blog. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page quoted Justice Robert H. Jackson’s famous observation that the Constitution is not a suicide pact and added, with reference to the author of Thursday’s majority opinion, “About Anthony Kennedy’s Constitution, we’re not so sure.”

On the other end of the spectrum, liberals warned that the vision of civil liberties embraced by the court’s narrow majority — security requires “fidelity to freedom’s first principles,” Justice Kennedy wrote — was hanging by a thread. “One more Bush justice on the court and the decision would likely have gone the other way,” said Kathryn Kolbert, president of People for the American Way. Senator Barack Obama, the presumed Democratic nominee, praised the decision as “an important step toward re-establishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law.”

Although Mr. McCain has criticized the Bush administration for employing harsh interrogation techniques, he has consistently supported barring the Guantánamo detainees from access to federal court. Justice Scalia’s dissenting opinion, which called the decision “disastrous,” “devastating” and tragic, was reminiscent of the tone of his dissenting opinion almost exactly five years ago, when the court overturned a Texas criminal sodomy law and set out a constitutional foundation for gay rights.

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It is typical of the Times Linda Greenhouse to blame Scalia's dissent and not Kennedy's idiotic opinion. But the fact is that the court has made itself into an issue and that does not favor liberals. It gives conservatives another reason to rally to McCain and overlook other differences.

It is such a nonsensical decision that liberals will soon be on the defensive for even defending it. It will also held conservative senators too as voters see the importance of fighting the evils of liberalism they will recognize the importance of getting senators who will support conservative judges.