Supreme Court again defies our first Central American President

Just enough non-strict-constructionists remained on the Supreme Court to strike down the section of the 2006 Military Commissions Act that eliminated habeas corpus protections that pre-date the Magna Carta. The court's 5-4 decision was split between those who value security above constitutional freedoms [1]:

“The game of bait-and-switch that today’s opinion plays upon the Nation’s Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.” - Justice Antonin Scalia

and those who believe liberty and security are not incompatible [2]:

The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times. Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system, they are reconciled within the framework of law. - Justice Anthony Kennedy

Glenn Greenwald was up early with an analysis [3]:

The Court's ruling was grounded in its recognition that the guarantee of habeas corpus was so central to the Founding that it was one of the few individual rights included in the Constitution even before the Bill of Rights was enacted.

Chief Justice Roberts, writing [4] for the dissenters, argued that the majority intervened before allowing the courts to determine whether "the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants" were, as spelled out in the 2006 Act, just as good as the nearly thousand year-old right that the Act denied them. Prisoners have only been held without charge or trial at Guantanamo for half a dozen years - and nearly two years since the Act's passage - so what's the fuss?

People For the American Way President Kathryn Kolbert issued a harsh statement on the case saying [5],

The Supreme Court has rebuked President Bush’s vision of the presidency as an office of limitless power, and declared that the president of a free nation cannot simply lock people up and throw away the key like some third-world dictator.

Kolbert echoes something a minister friend surprised me by saying a few weeks ago, that Bush is the United States' first Central American president.