Response to WaPo Editorial: A Congressional Duty
The Washington Post’s Saturday February 24th editorial, A Congressional Duty, addresses efforts in the Senate to restore habeas corpus.
ON THE FIRST day of the new Congress, two leading senators announced they would join in an attempt to reverse the hasty and ill-considered decision of the previous Congress to deprive foreign prisoners at Guantanamo Bay of the ancient right of habeas corpus, which allows the appeal of imprisonment to a judge. One of the senators, Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), predicted that the courts would rule that the provision of the Military Commissions Act eliminating habeas corpus was unconstitutional; he nevertheless joined the incoming chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), in sponsoring a bill restoring the appeal right.
The editorial does not mention that Specter actually voted for the Military Commissions Act of 2006 right after he decried it as unconstitutional. Indeed, Mr. Specter is one of the people to blame for the fix we are in, and the editorial notes, there is no guarantee that the courts will overturn the act.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled this week that Congress’s act was constitutional, and it threw the cases of dozens of Guantanamo detainees out of federal court. That ruling will almost certainly be reviewed by the Supreme Court on appeal, but Congress should not wait for its decision. It should move quickly on the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act.
The Supreme Court has already twice overruled decisions by the D.C. Circuit denying Guantanamo detainees habeas rights, but it is hard to predict whether it will do so again. The court’s composition has changed since those rulings, with the addition of justices more likely to be sympathetic to the arguments of the Bush administration.
Mr. Specter must not be allowed to claim credit he doesn’t deserve. The Senator did our country a great wrong, a wrong that may not be easily undone, if ever. Specter’s efforts to right the wrong that he is in no small way responsible for do not excuse the wrong itself. You can repeal laws, but you cannot untorture people.
