O’Connor Said to Criticize Bush Response to Gitmo Ruling
Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor criticized President Bush’s implementation of a Supreme Court ruling on Guantanamo military commissions at a recent forum, according to a Huffington Post column.
O’Connor spoke as part of a discussion at Hunter College on the constitutional balance of power between presidents and the Supreme Court, CUNY Newswire reports. Justice Stephen G. Breyer also appeared on the panel.
“The court has serious problems with enforcement power,” O’Connor said, according to the CUNY account. “We hope that when the court rules that other branches go along to take the hit. For the most part they do, but on occasion they don’t.”
The Huffington Post article says O’Connor took aim at Bush’s response to a ruling that held the military commissions violated the Geneva Conventions and U.S. laws.
“Justice O’Connor explained that, while the Supreme Court can rule on cases, it has no power to enforce its own ruling,” the Post article says. “For that, the court relies entirely on the executive branch. And even though the court had ruled Guantanamo was illegal, the executive branch—Bush’s White House—had still not enforced the court’s findings. Detainees were still imprisoned; the machinery for hearings had not even been put in place. Justice O’Connor was clearly not happy about this.”
O’Connor made a similar point in a 2005 speech in which she suggested that Congress could have further defined the rights of these detainees after the Supreme Court’s 2004 decision allowing courts to review Guantanamo detentions, Human Rights Magazine reports.
In a second Guantanamo ruling, the court in 2006 struck down Bush’s military commissions. They were replaced under a new law authorizing the commissions and removing federal court jurisdiction to hear habeas appeals of Guantanamo cases.
A Guantanamo case is currently pending before the Supreme Court, the third in a series. The New York Times wrote in a recent story that it “reflects an extraordinary interbranch drama, played out as a series of actions and reactions that has now cycled back to where it began: the role of the federal courts.”
