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July 1, 2006
Hamdan, Endo, Disarray, and Arrogance
Until now, the White House and particularly Vice President Dick Cheney had been dead set against working with Congress on issues involving the detainees, against the advice of some Republicans and some administration lawyers. By waiting until the court forced the issue, the White House may have made its task more difficult, leaving Mr. Bush with less support in Congress than he had after the attacks of Sept. 11.I am reminded of the discussions within the Roosevelt Administration (the War Department, the Justice Department, the Department of the Interior, and to a lesser extent the President himself) during the summer and fall of 1944 as they awaited the Supreme Court's decision in Ex parte Endo.
The Endo decision came on December 18, 1944; it declared illegal the continued detention of loyal Japanese Americans in the eight "relocation centers" that the War Relocation Authority was operating at that time.
What's interesting to me is that the Administration spent the summer and fall of '44 preparing for the possibility of an adverse outcome in Endo. Felix Frankfurter tipped the Administration off that the decision was coming on the 18th; this enabled the Administration to preempt the Supreme Court's decision by announcing on the 17th of December that it would be bringing the detention and exclusion of Japanese Americans from the West Coast to an end. It had a plan in place to end the mass exclusion of Japanese Americans and to replace it with a system of targeted individual exclusions of those it deemed especially dangerous.
Compare this to the disarray in Washington over the last couple of days.
It's quite obvious to me that this Administration just could not bring itself to believe and plan effectively for the possibility that it might lose the Hamdan case, and lose it big.
Why am I not surprised?
Posted by Eric at July 1, 2006 10:45 AM
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Comments
It's quite obvious to me that this Administration just could not bring itself to believe and plan effectively for the possibility that it might lose the Hamdan case, and lose it big
I disagree. I think the Bush Administration does not have, and has never had, any intention of complying with a SCOTUS decision that went against them. What you see is not disarray; it's calculated indifference -- they want the constitutional crisis that refusal to comply will bring.
Posted by: paperwight at July 1, 2006 1:28 PM