Supreme Court Roundup

Having been on vacation for two weeks, I missed entirely an annual June tradition. Each year about this time the justices of the United States Supreme Court hand down from on high tablets of stone containing enlightened pronouncements on the state of American law. Some of these pronouncements are sensible, coherent, and foundational to ordered liberty. These tend to be written by Chief Justice Roberts or Justices Scalia, Thomas, or Alito.

Other pronouncements are written by Justices Kennedy, Ginsburg, Stevens, Breyer, or Souter. These tend to be destructive of the rule of law, inconsistent, breathtakingly dismissive of common sense and the meaning of words, and coherent only to mainstream media commentators and liberal law professors.

Into the latter categorty falls last week's Boumediene decision. NRO has an excellent summary of that disastrous judicial event.

I have not yet read today's Dada decision. And Matthew Franck's handy Kennedy Rule, useful for determining whether a SCOTUS case was wrongly decided, does not pertain because the court did not in Dada declare anything unconstitutional. However, it is worth noting that Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in Dada on behalf of Ginsburg, Stevens, Breyer, and Souter. Scalia, Roberts, Thomas, and Alito dissent.

I repeat that I have not yet read the decision. It is possible that the majority correctly decided Dada. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.