When I was a 12-year-old in a Midwestern Baptist house, the most hated woman in the world was Hillary Clinton. Although "hate" would not be a fair word, since my family believes in those old-fashioned Christian principles such as "not hating." But she was not liked. C.S. Lewis said you could love someone without particularly liking them. That was the experience of myself and everyone I knew growing up, with regard to Hillary. Like (I think) most kids in my situation, I held on to those feelings naturally as I grew into an adult. After some good liberal arts and liberalism in college, I repudiated most of the conservative beliefs I "held" as a child, but the distaste for Hillary remained. Was it sexism? I don't think so. I have never been intimidated by women in positions of power or authority. My mom could tell my dad what was what, and my marriage has been a constant exercise in humility (not humiliation). Maybe I saw her as an opportunist, sticking with a cheating husband for some future gain. In retrospect, that is absurd. As someone recently pointed out around these parts, all politicians are opportunists. Maybe she just struck me as "fake." All the time. But damned if she didn't win my respect, every shot of whiskey, every "...that I know of." I went into the primaries silently rooting for Obama. By the end, despite this supposedly being such a divisive campaign, I had no preference whatsoever. Shouldn't the fact that both candidates are capable of slinging mud with the best of them, and withstanding copious amounts of slung mud, encourage anyone who wants to see a Democrat win? I am glad Obama won, because I think he matches up better against McCain, but I bet McCain is relieved that he doesn't have to tangle with Hillary. I wouldn't want to. Here's to many more years of her causing trouble.

Thank you for the article, Mr. Keillor. Thanks for your radio program as well. It made delivering pizzas on Saturday nights bearable. I don't really understand all of the ugliness in the comments. Mr. Obama couldn't possibly have personally insulted all of these people so greatly, unless him running for president is in and of itself an insult.

Now that the primaries are over, and there is a clear target, I expect this to become commonplace. The fact that the people spewing the bile still claim moral superiority is so very amusing to me. Ah, well. The Lord will repay every man according to what he has done, I suppose.

***But Ex parte Quirin, 317 U.S. 1 (1942) says otherwise. "Enemy combatants" or "illegal combatants" may be subjected to military tribunals.***

Ex Parte Quirin was relied on by the Bush administration to craft the 2001 Presidential Order that originally set up the Military Commissions. These commissions were ruled unconstitutional in Hamdan, according to the court because Bush did not have authority to set up the Commissions without Congressional approval. To reach this conclusion they (the non-dissenters, at least) used Jackson's executive power analysis from the Steel Seizure case. Who (between the executive or legislative branches) has the power to set up Military Commissions is a grey area, but Congress retains at least some power by virtue of their Constitutional directive to make rules for captures.

(There are other reasons that Quirin is not a very persuasive case, chief among them our responsibilities under Geneva, which the US entered into after Quirin was decided.)

Bush got permission from Congress to set up Tribunals through the MCA, which it should be noted was passed just before Republicans lost the midterm elections in 2006. The Democrats' unwillingness to oppose the bill was very much pathetic - it looks a lot like a law Pinochet would have passed.

In Boumediene, the court did not strike down the whole MCA, just the section that removes Habeas rights. While the Detainee Treatment Act (the predecessor to the MCA) stripped federal courts of jurisdiction to examine habeas petitions from Gitmo detainees, the court reasoned that it did not do so retroactively (it was unclear in the language of the DTA). The language of the MCA explicitly stated that habeas rights were stripped retroactively, i.e. prisoners in PENDING cases could not file habeas petitions in federal courts.

The reason the court did not approach the Constitutional issue of habeas rights previously (in Hamdan) is the constitutional avoidance doctrine. If the court can resolve an issue by statutory interpretation (in this case, interpreting the DTA to not strip jurisdiction retroactively) it will do so without approaching a constitutional question. In Boumediene, the court had to resolve the constitutional question.

With regard to our obligations under Geneva, I could write for days. POWs cannot be interrogated under Geneva, so it was never a possibility that the Bush administration would try to classify suspected terrorists as POWs. We simply need to interrogate them (and NOT torture them, which violates any number of treaties besides Geneva, chief among them the CAT). This is an extremely complicated subject; I have been taking relevant courses for the last six months and I am nowhere near an expert yet, but I will say that most of the arguments taking place in these letters are necessarily oversimplified. That being said, Shooter and Elephant haven't said anything that makes a lot of legal sense yet. The one question about whether this decision is an expansion of habeas rights does deserve a good answer, but I have neither the time nor the expertise to provide it.