Stuart Taylor, Jr.’s media appearances in print publications.
Deputy Solicitor General Paul Clement argued skillfully before the Supreme Court on April 28 for President Bush’s claim that the military can grab any American suspected of being an "enemy combatant," anywhere, at any time, and hold him incommunicado for months, years, even for life, with no chance to see a lawyer or tell a court that he is an innocent civilian.
President Bush seems likely to lose the first big war-on-terrorism battle that has come before the Supreme Court. He richly deserves to lose, for he has claimed absolute, unaccountable power to lock up more than 600 foreigners as "enemy combatants" in his prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, potentially forever, with no semblance of a fair hearing for those who claim to be innocent civilians.
"We did not know an attack was coming because, for nearly a decade, our government had blinded itself to its enemies." So said Attorney General John Ashcroft in his April 13 testimony to the 9/11 commission. He accused commission member Jamie Gorelick of "flawed legal reasoning" in a 1995 memorandum in which, as Bill Clinton’s deputy attorney general, she had helped raise a legalistic "wall [that] left intelligence agents afraid to talk with criminal prosecutors or agents."
Much of what goes by the name "international law" in academic and European circles these days deserves little respect from the United States, because it consists of rules made by foreign judges and professors that this sovereign nation has never adopted as binding. Many internationalists claim, for example, that firing missiles at terrorist leaders such as Osama bin Laden, as President Clinton once did, and aggressively interrogating captured terrorists, as the Bush administration is doing, violate international law. Bosh.
It is said that every country has the government it deserves. Do we really deserve to have Republican and Democratic administrations alike meet their critics less with factual refutation than with indiscriminate, often mendacious attacks on the critics’ credibility, character, and motivations? Are the American people so averse to what Learned Hand called "the intolerable labor of thought" that the surest way to win their votes is to resort to crude character assassination? Or have our leaders let the transitory joys of mudslinging blind them to the strategic advantage of showing some class?
The apparent success of terrorists in scaring the Spanish electorate into replacing one of President Bush’s closest allies with a strident Bush critic is not merely a disaster for Bush. It is a disaster for the United States, and for whoever wins the presidency in November. Terrorists may seek to use similar massacres to swing our own elections, although that might be more likely to elect Bush than John Kerry. And the rising tide of European appeasement of Al Qaeda and its ilk will threaten to isolate America for years to come.
"Because of the full faith and credit clause of the Constitution (which makes every state accept ‘the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State’), gay marriage can be imposed on the entire country by a bare majority of the state supreme court of but one state…. The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act? Nonsense. It pretends to allow the states to reject marriage licenses issued in other states. But there is not a chance in hell that the Supreme Court will uphold it."
Practitioners of the loosey-goosey approach to constitutional interpretation that maddens original-meaning conservatives such as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia are increasingly looking to a virtually unlimited source of new raw material: foreign law, including international human-rights conventions, Zimbabwe Supreme Court rulings, and whatever else might come in handy. Indeed, two of the more internationalist justices, Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, have confidently predicted that (in O’Connor’s words) the justices "will find ourselves looking more frequently to the decisions of other constitutional courts."
The perception that the Bush administration has systematically denied due process to the more than 650 alleged "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo Bay has both shocked Americans who care about the rule of law, me included, and done America enormous damage in world opinion. But the system may be starting to work. Indeed, it may have been working for some time better than I had thought.
Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, the charismatic personal-injury lawyer who would be president — or, perhaps, vice president — has done wonders for the image of the lawsuit industry. In more than a decade as his state’s most talented trial lawyer, Edwards won an estimated $150 million in jury awards and settlements for powerless people who had been horribly injured by reckless and negligent (and, perhaps, not so negligent) corporations and doctors. He cared passionately for his clients, believed deeply in his cases, and was apparently untainted by the ethical sleaze exhibited by some of the lawyers who have so lavishly financed his campaign. And his extraordinary ability to connect with ordinary Americans works magic on the campaign trail as well as in the courtroom.
