Hamdan: John Dean on the Detainee Treatment Act Hoax

I may have to reconsider all the nice things about Lindsey Graham after reading John Dean describe the attempt to defraud the Supreme Court by Senators Graham and Kyl:

The Hoax Fails: The Supreme Court Is Not Fooled

Hamdan’s lawyers, however, spotted the hoax. In their opposition to the motion to dismiss the case, they advised the Court that the supposedly conflicting legislative history was entirely invented after the fact, and that it consisted of “a single scripted colloquy that never actually took place, but was instead inserted into the record after the legislation had passed.” The brief noted, quite accurately, that this Graham-Kyl colloquy was “simply an effort to achieve after passage of the Act precisely what [they] failed to achieve in the legislative process.” Ultimately, the Supreme Court did not decide the jurisdictional issue until it rendered its full ruling on June 29 of this year. There, Justice Stevens concluded correctly that the Congress had not stripped the Court of jurisdiction with the DTA. Out of an apparent concern for interbranch comity, the High Court has chosen to ignore the bogus brief filed by Senators Graham and Kyl, rather than reprimanding the Senators. Nevertheless, when Graham and Kyl sought to file the very same brief, a month later, with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columba, Slate’s Emily Bazelon reports that court “issued an unusual order rejecting” their amicus brief alone, although they accepted five others. No one familiar with this remarkable behavior by Graham and Kyl can doubt why the court did not want to hear from these senators.

Well, Justice Scalia was fooled as was a particular troll who somehow thinks the whole Hamdan case revolved around the Detainee Treatment Act. And not to be outdone – Byron York shows us he is easily fooled by the subsequent spin from Senator Graham:

“Justice Stevens took the plain language of the statute and made legal contortions to get to the result the Court wanted to get to,” South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham tells National Review Online. “It was turning statutory interpretation and the interpretation of a record upside down, in my opinion, to get a predetermined result. The majority of the Court wanted to rule on the legal situation in Guantanamo Bay, and no statute was going to get in their way.”

Not only should the Court refuse to listen to Senators Graham and Kyl – their fellow Senators should ignore these two dishonest men.

Update: ThinkProgress reads what Senator Graham is saying adding:

What Graham is suggesting is unconstitutional. The Supreme Court has the final say on how treaties should be interpreted … It’s difficult for Graham and other loyal supporters of the Bush administration to accept that their legal approach to combating terrorism is dysfunctional. The Hamdan decision spelled this out.

Read the whole posts including the links. For a Senator who talks about the “rule of law” so much, it’s a shame that Lindsey Graham is so willing to let the Constitution be undermined.