[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 10]
[House]
[Pages 13783-13784]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            WAR POWERS COURT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Texas (Mr. Poe) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. POE. Mr. Speaker, forget about the days of judicial restraint. 
Those are the days when the Supreme Court thought their job was to 
interpret the law and follow the Constitution. The Supreme Court now 
has ushered in a new era power grab called judicial imperialism.
  Recently, the deeply divided Supreme Court, or the war powers court, 
as we shall call it, issued a ruling by Justice Kennedy that gave 
terrorists the right to argue their cases in Federal courts. In this 5-
4 decision, the court held that terrorism detainees captured on the 
battlefield engaged in war against America now held at Guantanamo Bay 
prison and other prison facilities under U.S. control have the same 
rights as American citizens.
  When I was at Gitmo prison, which I doubt Justice Kennedy has ever 
seen, I saw several detainees that had been captured, released, and 
captured again on the battlefield trying to kill Americans. I'm sure 
these enemy combatants are partying in Guantanamo prison tonight.
  Under the current law, individuals captured as enemy combatants have 
their cases reviewed by military commissions. It has always been the 
law under our Constitution that the President is the Commander in Chief 
of the military, and the President and Congress control war, not the 
nine justices on the Supreme Court. But the imperialistic war powers 
court ruled that these military commissions aren't fair enough for 
enemy combatants trying to kill American troops. It's interesting. 
These terrorists hate America,

[[Page 13784]]

hate freedom, hate our way of life but quickly run to American courts 
to seek redress against Americans.
  The five war power judges on the Supreme Court say these poor little 
misfits should have access to American courts, even though it is the 
first time in history we have given constitutional rights to combatants 
against the United States. Even in the War between the States, captured 
Confederate soldiers who were actually born in the United States were 
not allowed access to U.S. courts. They were tried by military 
tribunals. The same occurred in World War II when Nazis were tried by 
military tribunals. During the Revolutionary War, British spy John 
Andre was caught on U.S. soil spying with traitor Benedict Arnold. 
Andre was hung by the Commander in Chief, George Washington, and a 
military court without any judicial intervention.
  So what is next? Are we going to make our boys read terrorists their 
Miranda rights in the battlefield before they capture them? Justice 
Scalia was right, Mr. Speaker. In his dissent he argued that this 
ruling will make the war on terror harder on us and will ``almost 
certainly cause more Americans to be killed.''
  The Supreme Court is running roughshod over the Constitution of the 
United States and changing 200 years of judicial precedent. In fact, at 
the end of World War II, the Supreme Court explicitly determined in a 
series of cases that the writ of habeas corpus--that's an action that 
allows a person to seek relief from detention--does not apply to 
foreign combatants held outside the United States.
  It gets down to this question, Mr. Speaker: Who should be running our 
wars? Should Congress and the executive branch be in charge of war, or 
should the Supreme Court, in all of its supreme knowledge, be running 
the war?
  Well, according to the war powers court, they are the commanders in 
chief of the war. Now what does the imperialist war court want us to do 
with captured terrorists? Not capture them at all, or let them go so 
they can kill again?
  While terrorists continue to use innocent women and children as 
shields, continue to bomb our troops, shoot our sons and daughters in 
the battlefield and behead American civilians and our troops without 
granting them any rights, the Supreme Court tells us these terrorists 
ought to be treated like American citizens. The five imperialist judges 
on the Supreme Court have asserted the power of the Constitution that 
is reserved specifically to the executive branch and to the legislative 
branch.
  Mr. Speaker, this ought not to be, but that's just the way it is.

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