Boumediene v. Bush: The moral legitimacy & political sustainability of America (i.e.: a future for her citizens) preserved by a narrow margin.

The decision of the Supreme Court's decision in Boumediene v. Bush has preserved the commitment of the United States of America to the rule of law, albeit by the narrowest of margins.

Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion has of course provoked outraged sophistry, whiny self-righteousness and reckless hyperbole among the hired goons of the far Right. That's to be expected. Also to be fully expected is Justice Antonin Scalia's reckless, hyperbolic, whiny, self-righteous and outraged dissent. Scalia's dissent claims that Americans will certainly die as a consequence of the recognition of habeas corpus rights with respect to Guantánamo Bay detainees.

Uh. Even if Scalia's proclamation were somehow true -- which it isn't -- is Scalia asking us to accept a choice between (1) risking death as citizens of a nation that protects our civil liberties and (2) enjoying a marginally smaller risk of death as citizens of an authoritarian/totalitarian state in which our civil liberties can be brushed aside?

Scalia's not just a bully, but he's also a bully who's wrong. Moreover, he's hypocritical. For all of his rhetoric that his supposedly "originalist" jurisprudence somehow preserves political disinterestedness in Supreme Court decisions -- which he repeatedly claims to distinguish his jurisprudence from that of his colleagues -- his dissent is so brazenly political that Fox News/the Washington Times/the Weekly Standard/Rush "Pill-Popper" Limbaugh won't even need to ask their interns to "massage" the text of his incendiary remarks in order to fashion them into highly charged pieces of hard-Right propaganda. You can almost hear John Williams's fanfare-for-evil "The Imperial March" from The Empire Strikes Back.

Anyway, re the choice between liberty and life, I believe that we Americans were presented with a fantastic moral calculus in sixth grade history class:

Give me liberty, or give me death!

You know what? We should wake up and start addressing the real national security problem, which is that the Republican Party believes that the moral, legal and political authority of the United States can and should be bought and sold in times of national crisis or emergency.

Our future hinges on the durability of the rule of law, of civil rights. Without those things, all is lost. Fuck anyone who says otherwise. No one over the age of 50 had better dare to tell me otherwise, because this is an issue that concerns my future children. It's not about Scalia, nor is it about his children, nor is it about George W. Bush.

These people will all be dead and gone by the time the true ramifications of their negligence are felt, and most of their money will be gone with them. When the dust settles, the only thing that will matter to me, my loved ones, and to my children is whether or not I live in a nation of laws, in which civil liberties, due process and constitutional rights remain intact.

And so I take it very personally when Scalia mouths off about overriding these constitutional protections in order to preserve human life. Without our constitutional rights, we have no life, and we certainly can't in good faith expect to provide any kind of life for our children. Fuck you, Scalia: what about preserving my life? What about preserving the possibility of the lives of my children?

But, alas, Scalia's dissent isn't about me. And it isn't about you, Dear Reader. It has nothing to do with the document that protects us from totalitarianism and tyranny: U.S. Constitution. No, Scalia's dissent is about politics. More specifically: cultural politics. More specifically: the right of a small vanguard of ideological Executive Branch wackjobs to exercise unchecked power to break the law and violate the Constitution -- all of this under the cover of secrecy and without the slightest worry of ever having to be held accountable for chopping down the few remaining bulwarks that hold the tatters of our country aloft.

A succinct New York Times editorial gets it right: "Justice 5, Brutality 4." I had all but given up on the rag.

Seriously: why don't you read the opinion? Also, give a listen to the oral arguments, in which the razor-sharp questions posed by Justices Souter and Breyer will make you want to stand up and cheer.