I don’t know if they read my column at Cato, but clearly I’m not the only one who saw Boumedienne as a political shot across the bows:
Brink Lindsey of Cato offers an interesting argument on Boumedienne in this Bloggingheads.TV. He says we should read Boumedienne not as a case expanding the civil liberties of armed alien enemies, but as a separation of powers case: a limit on untrammelled executive power. That point is legally wrong, I think, but psychologically acute…. because it is probably true that the court would have shown greater deference to the administration’s proposed military tribunals had it ever got around to initiating any. The court’s reasoning in Boumedienne may be lousy. But its instincts are perhaps understandable.
Better too much habeus than not enough. Especially since it’s long past time to be expecting any of the three branches of the federal government to pay any attention to the actual law.