The U.S. Supreme Court recently turned the neat trick of making conservatives and liberals angry with their rulings in a one-week period. Strange to say, on both of these cases, the court got the law exactly right.
First was the court's 5-4 ruling that prisoners at Guantanimo Bay could file a Writ of Habeus Corpus to have a neutral judge determine if their detention was legal. Despite the fact that Habeus Corpus has been enshrined in Anglo-American law since the Magna Carta of 1215, conservatives howled that this ruling would open the floodgates to terrorists walking the streets of your town after being released by a soft-hearted judge.
But it meant no such thing. The court merely followed 800 years of precedent in allowing any prisoner to challenge the terms of his or her confinement. Judges will still have to be convinced that the prisoner is being held for no good legal reason before the prisoner is released. Thousands of such Habeus writs are filed on behalf of domestic prisoners every day--yet you don't see them getting released willy nilly.
The court then proceeded to irk liberals with their ruling that the Second Amendment gives each person the right to bear arms even if they're not enrolled in a local militia. The liberals screamed that this would mean more guns on the street and more people killed by guns every year.
Again, it meant no such thing. The Court clarified what most Americans already believe: That the right to bear arms cannot be taken away by a local government. Mind you, the amendment does not limit regulation of the armed populace. The registration and background checks required for ownership are still in place. But the Court did, finally, tell the world that Americans are so secure in our government that we don't mind the citizenry owning their own firearms.
Both decisions were 5-4, meaning that in each case the margin of error was a lone justice. I think, however, that the court got both of these cases exactly right. When the court is asked to examine a case involving a fundamental right guaranteed in the constitution, they would do well to remember the admonition which doctors have to promise before being licensed: First, do no harm. The Supreme Court is the last chance for many of our rights, and it's good to see that they understand that a right guaranteed is a right which cannot be eliminated by some lawless governmental body, be it a local city ordinance or the President of the United States.
