18 October 2006

Habeus, Shmabeus

Bush signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 into law this week. This legislation corrects such mistakes as insufficient executive power and habeus corpus. Hail Caesar!

Keith Olberman interviewed ConLaw professor Jonathan Turley about all the fun and games this legislation will bring us. See the video clip or read the transcript.

Congress has a lot of lawyers and I was curious as to how they voted. I didn't check the House because it has too many members but I did check out the Senate and came up with the following Harper's Index-like list:

YES votes: 65
NO votes: 34

Senators with law degrees: 59 of 99
No. of them who voted YES: 37 (65%)
No. of them who voted NO: 22 (35%)

Chance that a Republican voted YES: 99% (53 of 54)
Chance that a Republican with a law degrees voted YES: 100% (30 of 30)
Chance that a Dem/Ind voted YES: 25% (12 of 45)
Chance that a Dem/Ind with a law degree voted YES: 25% (7 of 29 )

The only Republican to vote NO was Lincoln Chafee. Ohio's senators both have law degrees and both voted NO. Kentucky's senators both voted NO. Indiana and Michigan split their votes.

While researching this I also discovered two unrelated but interesting factoids: Harry Reid worked as a Capitol Hill police officer for a few years and Maria Cantwell is a Miami U grad.

1 comment:

K. said...

this bill will go to the Supreme Court as fast as the lawyers can get it there...however, for Bush's purposes, it will likely not be before the 2008 term - at which point - what does he care, he's done...

We will finally find out if Scalia is indeed, as he proclaims to be, a textualist. The "writ" is right there in plain english in that there document. However, as i have no faith in him, my guess is the vote is split 5-4, finding it unconstitutional. Kennedy sides with the libs. It will become apparent that Kennedy is the most important man in America.