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Detainee post mortem: all politics, no law

By Mark Obbie

Michael Abramowitz's front pager today in the Post provides useful historical perspective on last week's 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in Boumediene v. Bush. It has the requisite back and forth between opposing experts (with some excellent, pithy quotes). And it seems to do an adequate job of explaining the politics of the Bush administration's strategies concerning Congress and the courts. But the story falls far short on the law. Every time any question of substance comes up -- what constitutional or statutory language was at stake, how competing sides interpreted it -- Abramowiz falls back on citing only "the law," as though it's in a black box and we simply must trust that someone says "the law" dictates this or that. Given that the crux of the story was that critics inside the administration warned for years that the detainee policies would go down in flames in the courts, it would be nice to know the basis on which the Court did exactly that -- and what the dissenters argue is wrong with that interpretation. I guess readers of even elite newspapers can't be trusted to have the necessary attention span or intellect to absorb just a few more grafs of actual substance.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on June 21, 2008 (boomark / email).