HOBBES GOT IT RIGHT
You recall Hobbes. He's the early modern English philosopher who remarked that a man in the state of nature enjoys a life that is brutish, nasty, and short -- which gives us that wonderful adjective "Hobbesian" to describe the charms of dystopia. So Hobbes thought civilization was a good thing and reconciled himself to the necessity of government as the only way we humans have figured out to keep civilization from decaying back into the state of nature.
As to government Hobbes thought that no matter how it is constructed, it always collapses into a supreme authority. We hubristic Americans with our 200-year-old constitution that divides governmental power into three independent branches might chuckle about that. The Founding Fathers did in fact devise a structure of government that is, in principle, capable through its checks and balances of forestalling its reduction to a supreme authority. However, Hobbes was taking human nature into account, and yesterday's decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case shows that Hobbes got it right.
Actually, to call what the Supreme Court did a "decision" is to be much too clinical about what occurred. It is the latest and most egregious assault by the federal judiciary upon the consitutional framework of our government. It is the next advance in the march toward judicial supremacy, a state of affairs in which the judiciary secures the supreme authority, to the exclusion of the executive and the legislature, to dictate what is and is not the law in every nook and cranny of these United States (and Gitmo, too). The Hamdan decision makes the judiciary's grab for power plain, although the trend of the past six decades of jurisprudence in this country hasn't left much doubt of this.
In Hamdan a 5-3 majority of the Supreme Court ruled that the Bush administration did not have the authority to conduct military tribunals of the detainess at the Guantanamo Bay facility who have been captured during our campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. The hook for this ruling was the application of the Geneva Convention to these detainees by means of a mendacious misreading of the treaty, which prohibits tribunals of prisoners of war. Of course, by any objective standard the Gitmo detainees flouted all of the rules of war laid down by the Geneva Convention and so forfeited its protections. But facts didn't matter to the high court. The lust for power did.
Thus the Supreme Court tore up the U.S. Constitution which clearly gives the president, as commander-in-chief, the power to determine the disposition of captured combatants; dismissed as non-existent the statute the U.S. Congress passed last year that gave the president the explicit authority to carry out military tribunals of the Gitmo detainees; and flushed down the memory hole its own past ruling that no matter what obligations the U.S. government has a signatory of the Geneva Convention, the judiciary has no authority to assign from it rights to individuals (e.g., Gitmo detainees). Today's high court knows no restraint in its usurpation of executive and legislative branch powers.
But then, why should it in light of the pusillanimous reaction of the Bush administration and the Congress to the Hamdan decision? Bush says he'll work with the court's ruling and Republican leaders in Congress say they'll recraft last year's legislation to comply with the court. What neither did was defend the prerogatives of their institutions as independent and equal branches of government to interpret and implement the Constitution as they see proper. The Supreme Court is not the supreme authority of the land. It does not have the last word on what is or is not the law. Bush has no obligation to conform to the high court's unconstitutional ruling. However, he does have the obligation as the executive to defend the Constitution and declare the Hamdan decision a dead letter.
Acting upon that obligation does not put Bush on a slipperly slope to dictatorship. We can thank the genius of the Founding Fathers for that when they gave the Congress the authority to impeach a president who would imperiously defy legitimate rulings of the Supreme Court. The checks and balances are there, but they only work if we have politicians with the courage to use them and, most importantly, voters who will hold their feet to the fire if they don't. Unfortunately, this has not been the case for a long, long time, and so the judiciary has run amok absent any significant restraint by the executive or legislature. At the end of the day, we the voters have only ourselves to blame for letting the marvel of the Founding Fathers, the government designed by the U.S. Constitution, collapse into the dictatorship of a supreme authority that Hobbes predicted every government must.
Hobbes got it right, because he got human nature right.
