Patterico's Pontifications

5/19/2006

Outrage: Government Deprives Gitmo Detainees of Fundamental Constitutional Rights

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 3:58 pm



I am outraged. Some inmates at Gitmo tried to commit suicide — and we tried to stop them.

Have we learned nothing about constitutional rights?

As the Supreme Court has said:

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.

If this language means anything [It doesn’t. — Ed. Humor me here. — P], it surely must mean that Gitmo detainees, undergoing severe depression at their inability to continue their jihad against America, have the right to end their lives in any way they see fit.

I am filing a lawsuit challenging our government’s indefensible actions. I will move the Court to put my clients in the same position they would have been in, absent this serious deprivation of fundamental constitutional rights.

Dead, in other words.

I’ll do all this pro bono publico — and, for once, that phrase will mean what it says.

ACLU types, are you with me?

Who’s the Racist Again?

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:44 am



So Harry Reid says that the amendment to make English our national language is racist.

Harry Reid, recall, once criticized (black) Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for writing a dissent in a case called “Hillside” that was, Reid said, written at an eighth-grade level. Thomas’s dissent was far inferior, Reid said, to the clearly reasoned dissent written in the same case by (white) Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Reid called Thomas an “embarrassment.” Unfortunately for Reid, a quick look at the law books showed that Scalia didn’t write a dissent in the Hillside case.

Reid, pressed on the inconsistency, insisted that Scalia’s opinion was better, even though Scalia hadn’t written one. Eugene Volokh said:

Instead of pointing to and justifying an honest disagreement about law or jurisprudence, Senator Reid makes unfounded assertions of incompetence — and backs them up with false statements (about Hillside) and mischaracterizations (that the “whole point” of his preferring Scalia to Thomas is that Scalia’s opinions are “very logical” and Thomas’s aren’t).

Reid, of all people, should not casually throw around the word “racist.”


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