Okay, so maybe that’s a bit hyperbolic, he’s not quite Sulla yet (and I doubt he will be returning his powers to the more general government at the end of his term!), but apparently the courts have decided (again) that he has the power to abrogate the Constitution more or less at his whim, and hold American citizens without habeaus corpus rights indefinitely…
‘Dirty bomb’ detention is upheld
“The exceedingly important question before us is whether the president of the United States possesses the authority to detain militarily a citizen of this country who is closely associated with al-Qaeda,” the Virginia court ruling said.“We conclude that the president does possess such authority,” added the ruling written by Judge Michael Luttig, who is seen as one of Mr Bush’s possible nominations for the Supreme Court.
Allow me to quote Albert Dicey as a response to that story. Dicey wrote that the Habeas Corpus Acts “declare no principle and define no rights, but they are for practical purposes worth a hundred constitutional articles guaranteeing individual liberty”. I wonder what the converse of that statement is–what removing those rights would cost in “practical” terms?
