Roberts knows law when he sees it
Here's a blog entry that made me weep with joy. (What say you, CG?)
One thing I'm going to have to look at more closely is this description:
The Bush Administration did not agree with the World Court ruling, and, in fact, withdrew from the international protocol that gave the World Court the authority to enforce the Vienna Convention against countries that had signed it. Even so, Bush issued a memo in February 2005 agreeing that the U.S. would seek to obey the World Court, and he told the states involved to “give effect” to that tribunal’s decision in the cases of the 51 Mexicans involved in the World Court case. The U.S. government stepped into the case in Texas courts to assert the authority of the President to lay upon the states a duty follow his mandate to obey the World Court. The case thus reached the Supreme Court as a major test of presidential authority, in seeking to enforce treaty obligations, to override contradictory state criminal procedure rules. In that test, the presidency clearly lost.
What the hey. What meds is our president on? This reminds me of the administration stance on Heller. Fish or cut bait, George.
Oh, and isn't it amazing who the dissenters are? Told there were three, would you have any trouble guessing which ones? Eh, maybe one.
posted by ColumbusGuy @ 3:10 PM
3 Comments:
It's a double-edged decision, so it's not that easy to predict how the court would vote.
First there's the part that you seem to like--that some international treaties we agree to aren't self-executing. That was the 6-3 vote. Still, there's another part of the opinion just as important, limiting executive power and saying it's not law just because the president says it is. That was unanimous.
I missed that part: only some international treaties aren't self executing?
They're self-executing if they explicitly say they're self-executing. Otherwise you'll need accompanying legislation. This distinction matters from a diplomacy point of view because there are times you'd rather not have to be precise up front about what you're going to do to put an agreement into effect. Sometimes you like that "player to be named later" level of fudging to get a deal done.
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