Upcoming Supreme Court cases
There are some important Supreme Court cases coming up this week. Audio of the oral arguments for the case should be available a few days after the arguments at Oyez, and written transcripts should be available 10-15 days after the arguments at the Supreme Court's Argument Transcripts page.
On Tuesday, April 27, the Court will hear Cheney v. U.S. D.C. District of Columbia (03-475). This is the case that was brought against Dick Cheney after his refusal to turn over the names of the people involved in the creation of the president's 2001 energy plan, which some people felt was heavily slanted in favor of continued reliance on petroleum. This led these people to believe that the vice-president loaded the committee with people from the oil industry, and these people wanted to know who was on the committee. Cheney refused to give the names out, citing executive privilege. The Supreme Court will decide "whether the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), 5 U.S.C. App. 1, et seq., can be construed, consistent with the Constitution, principles of separation of powers, and this Court’s decisions governing judicial review of Executive Branch actions, to authorize broad discovery of the process by which the Vice President and other senior advisors gathered information to advise the President on important national policy matters, based solely on an unsupported allegation in a complaint that the advisory group was not constituted as the President expressly directed and the advisory group itself reported." Bush says that it impedes the executive's ability to privately consult with people if he has to divulge the names of those people and what they said to him.
Links: Cheney's brief; Judicial Watch Inc.'s (respondent's) brief; Sierra Club's (respondent's) brief
The second case is more topical and probably more important. It's Rumsfeld v. Padilla (03-1027) and, like Rasul v. Bush, it deals with habeas corpus rights. Padilla, a U.S. citizen, was implicated in a plot to construct a "dirty bomb" (a regular bomb filled with radioactive waste). The administration used some questionable intelligence to tie Padilla to al-Qaeda and has held him incommunicado for two years in a Navy brig, where he is not allowed to see anyone, including his lawyer. At issue is "whether the President has authority as Commander in Chief and in light of Congress’s Authorization for Use of Military Force, Pub. L. No. 107-40, 115 Stat. 224, to seize and detain a United States citizen in the United States based on a determination by the President that he is an enemy combatant who is closely associated with al Qaeda and has engaged in hostile and war-like acts, or whether 18 U.S.C. 4001(a) precludes that exercise of Presidential authority." Padilla's lawyer claims that, since he can't even see Padilla, there's no way to get a writ of habeas corpus for Padilla to question the legitimacy of his incarceration. A District Court ruled that the president had the authority to detain Padilla, but also said that Padilla could contest his status as an "enemy combatant" and that he was entitled to meet with his lawyer to do this. A Court of Appeals ruled that the president had no authority to authorize domestic detentions, and since Congress did not authorize the detention, "Padilla either must be charged with a crime, held as a material witness, or released."