UPI: Supremes challenge Bushies. Now what?

WASHINGTON, DC, United States (UPI) -- The U.S. Supreme Court ruling blocking the use of military tribunals to try terror suspects sends a clear message around the world: The United States is still a republic, not an empire.

The epochal ruling will be welcomed enthusiastically by libertarian conservatives and liberals across America. But it also looks likely to prove a rallying point for Republicans loyal to President George W. Bush as the midterm congressional election campaigns heat up this summer.

The ruling is most of all a major blow to the determined drive of the Bush administration in both its terms of office to vastly increase the reach of executive power in the United States outside the scrutiny of the federal courts, the media and the U.S. Congress.

Bush administration officials, including former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and the president`s closest legal advisers, have repeatedly argued before Washington audiences -- both on and off the record -- about what they saw as the need to extend the prerogatives of executive privilege.

Yet, now after six and a half of his eight years in office -- the maximum permitted by the U.S. Constitution since a dominant Republican majority in Congress pushed through the 22nd Amendment in the early 1950s -- Bush has still not been able to assure himself of a reliable majority of sympathetic justices on the nine-person Supreme Court to validate his programs.

Within the past year, Bush has had the opportuntiy to appoint two new justices to the Court, including new Chief Justice John Roberts. But the four-person liberal wing of the court remains unbowed and the key swing justice, Anthony Kennedy -- ironically an appointee of conservative Republican President Ronald Reagan -- joined them on this key decision.

One of the most significant aspects of the tribunals judgment is that it showed Roberts -- by far the least experienced member of the court -- remains Chief Justice in name only. He was unable to persuade a single justice outside the predictable conservative bloc of himself, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and fellow Bush appointee Samuel Alito -- to support the administration`s position.

Arguably, despite Bush`s two appointments, the conservative wing of the court is now significantly weaker than it was before Chief Justice William Rehnquist, dying of cancer, stepped down and Justice Sandra Day O`Connor retired. For Rehnquist`s vast experience and prestige pulled more weight with Kennedy and the liberal justices than Roberts has so far been able to do.

The tribunal`s ruling displays aspects of the Court`s role in the actual -- as opposed to legal and theoretical -- workings of the U.S. Constitution and balance of powers that have been a recurring theme over the decades.

Abraham Lincoln was able to get a largely sympathetic Supreme Court within only one four-year term to rubber-stamp even his most unprecedented and sweeping extensions of executive privilege and breaking of prior precedent such as suspending habeas corpus in the state of Maryland and securing it for the Union by the use of the federal military at the start of the 1861-1865 Civil War.

However, like Bush, Franklin D Roosevelt, arguably the most important and powerful president of the past century, was stymied by a conservative, hostile court, through most of his first two terms of office. And his ambitious plan to dilute the court by expanding the number of justices on it was stopped dead in its tracks in the middle of his second term.

Despite huge Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, the defeat of FDR`s 1937 court-packing plan killed the previously irresistible momentum of his New Deal stone dead on Capitol Hill. No Democratic president was able to push through any more significant pieces of liberal reforming legislation for more than a quarter of a century until the advent of President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Bush too looks unlikely to be able to regain by legislative action on Capitol Hill the power he has lost by the Supreme Court decision Thursday. The Democratic minority in both houses of Congress has been largely spineless in seeking to impose any effective congressional oversight of the vastly expanding domestic surveillance apparatus that Bush and his administration created following the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But in recent months, especially as the quagmire in Iraq has gotten worse, increasing numbers of Bush`s own party, especially in the Senate but also in the House of Representatives, have shown themselves increasingly reluctant to vote new powers to the president.

The Supreme Court`s action Thursday created a very important precedent for itself and for lower federal courts around the nation. Having voided a key Bush executive procedure once, it is more likely to do so again. And federal judges around the United States are likely to be more bold in finding against the federal government in cases where it is accused of improperly extending its powers because they will believe the Supremes are now more likely to uphold their rulings rather than overturn them.

Most important, the Supreme Court`s ruling may give the United States` tarnished image a significant boost around the world by reminding other nations that Americans ultimately do take their liberties and their venerable Constitution with its elaborate system of checks and balances seriously.

The Court`s decision confirms a pro-American prediction made in Egyptian-American film-maker Jehane Noujaim`s remarkable 2004 documentary 'Control Room' about the inner-workings of the Qatar-based al-Jazeera satellite television channel.

As my UPI colleague Claude Salhani noted two years ago, the film records al-Jazeera executive Hassan Ibrahim sagely predicting, 'The United States will fix the United States. I have full faith in the U.S. Constitution.'

Copyright 2006 by United Press International