A CAUTION: REMEMBER DAMIENS

I thought I needed to add a word of caution to the blog I wrote this morning, "DAY OF GLORY", concerning yesterday's Supreme Court decision in Boumediene v. Bush et.al. The concept of the separation of powers, upon which the justices relied heavily in this decision, comes to us from the French jurist Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et Montesquieu, who advocated it in his The Spirit of the Laws, a best-seller in the eighteenth century. Montesquieu was a member of the parlementaires, group of nobles who held largely hereditary positions in the French parlements, which were not legislative bodies like the English parliament, but rather judicial ones. They held a unique place in French life in the eighteenth century because like our Supreme Court, they were the only institution which could declare an edict of the King to be unconstitutional-- in the language of the time, contrary to the fundamental laws of France, issuing a remonstrance to that effect. This right was of course contested by the absolutist monarchy of France. The struggle between the supporters of the monarchy and the supporters of the parlements was an on-going one, and after Montesquieu's death, it resulted in one perfectly hideous incident. In 1757, a half-mad individual named Robert-Francois Damiens, taking the parlementaire literature a bit too far, attempted to assassinate Louis XV. He was punished according to the law of the time by being publicly drawn and quartered. A sickening description of his death was put into the mouth of the Marquis de Sade by Peter Weiss in his play Marat/Sade. The king could of course have moderated the punishment and the fact that he did not was widely interpreted as a blow against the parlementaires, who accordingly were cowed into silence for some years, until the French Revolution swept away the whole system-- unfortunately the good as well as the bad-- in 1789.

Make no mistake about it, the executive branch of our government is every bit as vicious as the French monarchy and will take similar, if not so public, revenge for yesterday's ruling. Do not let it provoke you! If I have at times seemed in these pages to be advocating revolution, yesterday's decision has changed everything. It has restored our government of law, and until we find out how the executive is going to react we must make no moves in this direction. The only sort of violence which would be permissible under the circumstances is in personal self-defense, should the government attempt to apprehend us for illegal reasons, such as being Muslim or a dissenter, and that only because it has shown itself unwilling to permit those it takes into its custody for political reasons to have a fair trial. To learn more about the decision, I recommend that people go to the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has published an excellent analysis of it (see http://ccrjustice.org/learn-more/faqs/legal-analysis:-boumediene-v.-bush...)