We don’t need no stinkin’ Supreme Court

From the Times piece on Bush’s approval of torture:

After the Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that the Geneva Conventions applied to prisoners who belonged to Al Qaeda, President Bush for the first time acknowledged the C.I.A.’s secret jails and ordered their inmates moved to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The C.I.A. halted its use of waterboarding, or pouring water over a bound prisoner’s cloth-covered face to induce fear of suffocation.

But in July, after a monthlong debate inside the administration, President Bush signed a new executive order authorizing the use of what the administration calls “enhanced” interrogation techniques — the details remain secret — and officials say the C.I.A. again is holding prisoners in “black sites” overseas. The executive order was reviewed and approved by Mr. Bradbury and the Office of Legal Counsel.

The arrogance of these people is just staggering. Told by no less an authority than the Supreme Court of the United States that what they are doing is illegal, the Bush administration publicly discontinues the illegal practice — then reinitiates the same illegality in secret.

The significance of this cannot be understated. Legal Positivist H.L.A. Hart, in The Concept of Law, described the complex interplay between what he called primary and secondary rules of law — the first being laws of command, the second being the laws which determine how primary rules are created, modified, interpreted, or abolished.

What the Bush administration has done has gone far beyond simply breaking the law; his brazen acts erode the very means by which America has, for centuries, formulated and administered its system of laws. This administration no longer recognizes Marbury v. Madison, which posited that the Supreme Court was the ultimate arbiter of what is and what isn’t law, as legitimate. He has arrogated that to the executive branch, and his contempt for our system of laws, and the notion that we are a nation of laws and not men, is manifest.