Sometimes It Still Works

SOMETIMES IT STILL WORKS

This past week, the US Supreme Court ruled 5-3 that President Bush and his administration did not have the right to hold a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay and appoint a “commission” to try him for “Conspiracy” without any legal basis. They said, in many pages, that there is no authority to do so under the Constitution (I’m sure that “W” has heard of that document somewhere), federal law, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions, or the Law of War. In other words, he isn’t yet “King George III.”

Some have held this as being a rebuke to the President and the administration, and it is certainly that. Some have held the decision to be an opening for conservatives to introduce new statutes to give him the power, thus satisfying their ultra-conservative base and attempting to put the Democrats on the Defensive; and it is certainly that also. Yet others have advanced the premise that it shows the need for yet another right-wing justice to be appointed before “the King” leaves office.

I view it as proof, once more, that the system devised by a group of gentlemen farmers, lawyers, business men and others more than two hundred years ago still works. Having lived through tyranny, they feared it. Having seen the ravages of unrestrained power, they sought to temper it with checks and balances. Does it always work? Not always. Does it work most of the time? Yes. Most importantly, though, when the “long view” is taken, we have always passed through the troughs of our nation’s history to emerge with greater personal freedom than we had before.

HERE IS A FOURTH OF JULY TOAST TO THOSE WHOSE WISDOM, COURAGE AND VISION BROUGHT US THAT “MORE PERFECT UNION,” A GOVERNMENT “OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE AND FOR THE PEOPLE,” THAT “SHALL NOT PERISH FROM THIS EARTH.”