Update: See An Animosity to Civil Liberties, John Yoo, Totalitarian
via mal contends - The bare five-to-four majority in the Supreme Court decision, Boumediene v. Bush /Al Odah v. United States, preserving the writ of habeas corpus (in Latin, "you shall have the body") demonstrates that civil liberties in our country today is a partisan deliberation.
Civil liberties, among the rationales behind the founding of the United States of America, do not (with notable exceptions) enjoy a high regard in today's Republican Party.
The conclusion is clear that voting Democratic (however problematic the Party proves in many spheres of concern to progressives) is imperative, if preserving civil liberty is an objective.
Just consider if Robert Bork and not Anthony M. Kennedy, the author of Boumediene opinion, were on the Court today.
Kennedy was confirmed in 1988 after the U.S. Senate rejected Bork and his statist-reactionary jurisprudence that is hostile to the very concept of individual liberty.
Kennedy is no William O. Douglas, but we can be thankful that Robert Bork is not on the Court today supplying the fifth vote to entrench reactionaries' politcal power and destroy the liberty and due process rights of American citizens.
The stakes are high.
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