John Yoo on Court-Stripping

Marty Lederman

In today's Wall Street Journal [thanks to Howard Bashman for the link], John Yoo correctly emphasizes that the primary impact of the Military Commissions Act is, as Jack has explained, to attempt to eliminate any judicial checks on the Executive's conduct of the conflict against Al Qaeda:

Congress and the president did not take the court's power grab lying down. They told the courts, in effect, to get out of the war on terror, stripped them of habeas jurisdiction over alien enemy combatants, and said there was nothing wrong with the military commissions. It is the first time since the New Deal that Congress had so completely divested the courts of power over a category of cases. It is also the first time since the Civil War that Congress saw fit to narrow the court's habeas powers in wartime because it disagreed with its decisions. The law goes farther. It restores to the president command over the management of the war on terror. . . . Except for some clearly defined war crimes, whose prosecution would also be up to executive discretion, it leaves interpretation and enforcement of the treaties up to the president. It even forbids courts from relying on foreign or international legal decisions in any decisions involving military commissions.

Good to see that John Yoo and Jack Balkin are, for once, on the same page!

Eliminating the checks and balances of judicial oversight has been the primary goal of the Administration all along, as John's own memos and other writings quite forthrightly reveal. In his new book, John describes how in the weeks after September 11th, an interagency task force of lawyers was convened to study the wide array of legal issues related to the detention and trial of suspected Al Qaeda personnel. Presumably there were many difficult questions that the task force debated. But there was, as John recounts, "one thing we all agreed on" -- namely, "that any detention facility should be located outside the United States."

Why was this the one point of absolute consensus within the Administration? Isn't that odd -- that the easy point of unanimous agreement was to keep our detention operations outside of our own nation, above all else? It's not as if these captured persons were all detained where they were found. No -- they were shipped halfway around the world; but instead of, say, detaining them at a military brig in South Carolina, which would have been the logical plan, the planes and ships made a sharp left turn at the last moment so that these folks would disembark in Cuba, which is less than 100 miles from the Florida coast.

The reason, of course, for such a resolute determination to keep the detainees offshore, was (as John quite candidly writes) because the lawyers assumed GTMO was a law-free zone -- a location impervious to any judicial oversight. And of course, in light of what we were doing to these detainees, there was damn good reason to keep our operations out the plain sight of any courts, lest they have the temerity to insist that the Administration follow the law.

The Supreme Court rejected this gambit in the Rasul case, and John is correct that the MCA attempts, in effect, to reverse Rasul and to render the President's conduct nonreviewable.

John unabashedly celebrates this move. But he doesn't give much of a justification for it, except that he does not like the idea of the courts reviewing the legality of the Executive's actions in wartime. There is a certain irony in this, given the source: This is, after all, the lawyer who has most aggressively promoted the view that notwithstanding all of its war-related article I powers, Congress is entirely disabled from regulating the Executive's wartime decisions. And yet he not only thinks that Congress can strip the courts of their constitutional functions in wartime -- he positively revels in it.

Presumably, John would agree that if these detainees were being held a few hundred miles away, in Florida or in South Carolina, they not only would have had traditional habeas rights, but also would enjoy substantive constitutional rights of due process with respect to their treatment in detention and their ability to challenge their detention. OK, but then doesn't that cast a cold light on his gleeful defense of the MCA? Is there any good, persuasive reason why those constitutional rights should suddenly disappear -- and that we should encourage Congress to eliminate the cognate statutory rights -- simply because we chose to turn left at Florida rather than to turn right?

Of course there isn't. The reason John and his colleagues are so spooked by the prospect of judicial review is that they want the President to be able to act in accord with very radical and questionable legal interpretations, without any risk that anyone will ever call them on it. If this Administration had not chosen to take such a cavalier and dismissive attitude toward the substantive legal norms (of statute, treaty and laws of armed conflict) that govern the conduct of war, it would have nothing to fear from judicial review. The only reason they are desperate to shut the courts out is that their conduct is of such dubious legality.

For what it's worth, although John gets the big picture of the MCA right, there are several inaccurate statements in John's Op/Ed, including these:

1. "The writ of habeas corpus had never been understood to benefit enemy prisoners in war. The U.S. held millions of POWs during World War II, with none permitted to use our civilian courts (except for a few cases of U.S. citizens captured fighting for the Axis)."

Wrong. As I've previously written:

[The habeas-stripping provision of the MCA] would appear to overrule not only the recent Rasul decision, which recognized habeas rights for detainees at Guantanamo, but also the holdings in the World War II cases of Quirin and Yamashita, which dealt with alien detainees in the U.S. and in an occupied insular possession, respectively. In each case, the Court rejected the President's assertion that he could deny the detainee the right to challenge the legality of military-commission proceedings(and detention) by writ of habeas corpus. See Quirin, 317 U.S. 1, 25 (1942) ("neither the [President's] Proclamation nor the fact that they are enemy aliens forecloses consideration by the courts of petitioners' contentions that the Constitution and laws of the United States constitutionally enacted forbid their trial by military commission"); Yamashita, 327 U.S. 1, 8-9 (1946) ("The courts may inquire whether the detention complained of is within the authority of those detaining the petitioner. . . . [Congress] has not foreclosed their right to contend that the Constitution or laws of the United States withhold authority to proceed with the trial. It has not withdrawn, and the Executive branch of the government could not, unless there was suspension of the writ, withdraw from the courts the duty and power to make such inquiry into the authority of the commission as may be made by habeas corpus.").

If [the MCA] had been in place in 1942 and 1946, and if such a withdrawal of habeas rights were constitutional -- which remains an unresolved question -- the Court would never have been able to address the merits of the questions presented in Quirin and Yamashita. Thus, this habeas-stripping provision would be a much more dramatic repudiation of traditional, longstanding habeas rights than has been commonly acknowledged.

2. "[T]he traditional understanding [pre-Hamdan was] that Geneva does not cover terrorists, who are not signatories nor 'combatants' in an internal civil war under Article 3."

Also mistaken. As Justice Stevens rightly explained, the much more common "understanding" was that such detainees receive the baseline, minimum rights established by Common Article 3, which is all that the Hamdan Court held. See my discussion of Myths Nos. 4, 5 and 8, here.

3. "Most of the press and the professional punditry missed the big story," namely, that the MCA attempts to cut off judicial review.

This is, of course, absurd, as any rudimentary search of the blogosphere, the New York Times, the Washington Post, etc., would readily demonstrate.
Posted 9:24 AM by Marty Lederman [link]