The Senate today failed to pass a bill restoring the right of habeas corpus to detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The Senate needed 60 votes to pass the bill; 56 Senators voted for the bill. Thus, the extraordinary measures of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 still stand, preventing detainees from access to a speedy trial and from access to their choice of legal representation.
Why should we care? While habeas corpus has been suspended at different times in the history of our country, these recent changes in the law may set precedents that will permanently affect this traditional right to challenge one's incarceration or the incarceration of another, as Jeffrey Toobin suggests in a 2006 article in The New Yorker.
President Bush has said over and over again that terrorists hate our freedom. Well, based on these legal challenges to the basic rights underlying those freedoms, it seems that the Republican party hates freedom, too. Note again the names of those who voted against re-establishing the right of habeas corpus to the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Only six Republicans voted to uphold this traditional right that Americans have long held to be a cornerstone of freedom.
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