I have not yet had a chance to fully study the Court's opinion in Boumediene v. Bush. But I will note one very important aspect of this case that differs from the Court's previous war on terror decisions rebuking the Bush administration. In earlier cases such as Rasul v. Bush, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Court invalidated unilateral actions taken the by the executive, repudiating the Bush Administration's ultra-expansive interpretation of wartime executive power. However, Hamdan specifically left open the possibility that the administration's Guantanamo policies might be constitutional if authorized by congressional legislation. The Republican Congress (for the most part) provided that authorization in the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

In Boumediene, the Court challenges congressional power as well as the executive. It strikes down as unconstitutional several provisions of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the MCA. This is a nearly unprecedented situation where the Court rejected an important assertion of wartime power backed by both of the other branches of government. To my knowledge, virtually every previous case in which the Court ruled an important wartime policy unconstitutional was one where the policy in question was adopted by the executive acting alone.

As a political matter, the majority justices might might well have reasoned that they could avoid a dangerous interbranch confrontation because the Republican Congress which enacted the DTA and MCA is now gone, and the Bush Administration has only a few months remaining. But even a Democratic administration and Congress might be reluctant to give terrorist detainees as much protection as Boumediene requires.

The fact that the decision challenges congressional power as well as executive power doesn't mean that it is necessarily wrong. On that question, I am divided in my own mind. The difficult question is whether habeas corpus applies to enemy combatants seized in operations abroad (I don't doubt that the Bush Administration was wrong to assert that it doesn't apply to US citizens accused of terrorist acts and captured in the US).

Importantly, the Court does leave Congress a way out. If it wants to, Congress could still strip detainees of the protection they get under Boumediene by enacting a statute suspending the writ of habeas corpus under the Suspension Clause. With a Democratic Congress, I suspect that we might get a new detainee law that suspends the writ for certain categories of terror detainees, but also perhaps gives them more procedural rights than they got under the Republican-enacted MCA. For a variety of reasons, I doubt that the Democrats will be willing to take the risk of allowing the detainees to retain full habeas rights. If they don't act and a terrorist released as a result of a habeas petition commits some atrocity, the Dems will take a predictable political hit. Especially if Obama wins the presidential election, expect the Democrats to enact some sort of partial suspension of habeas corpus, combined with new, but limited statutory procedural rights for detainees. At least that is my tentative prediction.

UPDATE: Some commenters cite Ex Parte Milligan as an example of a case where the Court invalidated a joint congressional-executive wartime policy. In a narrow technical sense, they have a point. However, it is important to recognize that Milligan was decided only after the war in question (the Civil War) was over. The Court would have been much more reluctant to take on both of the other branches if the war had still been ongoing (as of course it still is in the Boumediene case).

UPDATE #2: As Marty Lederman points out in an e-mail to me, the Milligan decision actually held that the president lacked congressional authorization for his actions in so far as the Habeas Corpus Act of 1863 forbade him to subject civilians to military jurisdiction in states where the civilian courts continued to operate. The Court also ruled that, in some situations, even Congress would lack the power to subject civilians to military trials; but it emphasized that Congress had not taken any such action in the case before it. Be that as it may, it is significant that even in Milligan, the Court did not repudiate both of the other branches of the federal government head on, in the way it has now done in Boumediene.

In my last post on the Court's decision in Boumedienne, I suggested that Congress could, if it wanted to, revoke War on Terror detainees' rights to a hearing in federal court by suspending the writ of habeas corpus. In his own more recent post, Jonathan Adler raises some interesting questions about whether Congress really could suspend the writ. As Jonathan puts it:

The Suspension Clause provides that "[t]he Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." This language seems to impose two separate conditions on the use of the clause: 1) "Rebellion or Invasion" and 2) "public Safety." Assuming, for the sake of argument, that these requirements are justiciable (an assumption I don't necessarily accept) what showing would the government have to make?

Before trying to address this issue, I should note that the meaning of these two requirements of the Suspension Clause have never been litigated in the Supreme Supreme Court, and that I am not a habeas expert. Therefore, I'm far from certain that I'm right about what I say below, and would welcome correction from specialists in the field.

That said, I think Jonathan asks exactly the right questions. However, I am less skeptical than he is that the requirements in question could be met. The War on Terror surely doesn't qualify as a "Rebellion," but Al Qaeda's attacks on New York and Washington DC and its attempts to attack other targets in the United States could potentially qualify as an "Invasion." A relatively small invasion to be sure (in terms of the number of enemy combatants involved). But a big one in so far as it has killed more Americans than any other incursion of enemy forces onto US soil in our history, at least since the War of 1812.

One could potentially interpret the requirement of "Rebellion or Invasion" to mean that the writ can only be suspended in those areas where the invasion is ongoing; Jonathan, in his post, seems to make this assumption or at least raise the possibility that it is correct. If the assumption is valid, it rules out suspension of the writ with respect to enemy personnel captured abroad or anywhere in the United States other than New York City and Washington, DC on the day of September 11, 2001 itself. However, I don't think the assumption is valid. No such restriction on the scope of the suspension power is is evident in the text. And it would be somewhat absurd to hold that Congress can only suspend the write of habeas corpus in those parts of the United States where US authorities have no ability to detain people anyway because the areas in question are occupied by enemy forces. I also don't think that the constitutional validity of suspension depends on whether the detainees are held at Guantanamo or some other site. Nothing in the clause suggests that suspension is only permitted if the detainees are held in the same general area as the location of the rebellion or invasion that triggered the Suspension Clause in the first place.

A related question is whether the "invasion" has ended now that (as far as we know) al Qaeda forces are no longer present on US soil in any significant numbers. My tentative view is that the emergency triggered by an invasion can continue so long as the war that the invasion was a part of does. It doesn't necessarily require the continued presence of enemy forces on US soil, though it probably does require a continued serious threat that they may return as part of the same ongoing conflict.

The second requirement - that "the public Safety may require" suspension - is even more difficult to assess. Much depends on the question of how much deference courts should grant to executive or congressional determinations that the public safety really would be threatened if the writ is not suspended. It seems to me that the text does mandate some degree of deference because it states that the standard is that "the public Safety may require" suspension. This suggests that the government need not definitely prove that suspension is essential to public safety.

At the same time, I don't think that the language of the Suspension Clause justifies near-absolute judicial deference to a congressional determination that the public safety requires suspension. My best guess is that the "public safety" prong of the Clause could be satisfied by something similar to proof by a preponderance of evidence. As a practical matter, I think that the Court would defer to Congress' judgment if the suspension were narrowly targeted and supplemented by some other form of due process protection for detainees.

As Jonathan indicates, the above analysis assumes that these issues are justiciable at all. It could be argued that they are within the exclusive judgment of Congress. I won't argue this issue in detail. But I doubt that the rebellion/invasion and "public safety" requirements of the Clause are completely nonjusticiable. If they were, Congress could decide that virtually any real or imagined emergency is a threat to "public safety" and then use it as an excuse to suspend the writ of habeas corpus.

To say that suspension of the writ would (probably) be constitutional is not to say that it should be done. I'm not sure that it should be enacted at all. If Congress does attempt suspension, I believe that any such effort should be narrowly focused, and supplemented with other types of protections for the rights of detainees.