Hey, whaddaya know?

A victory for the rule of law. How 'bout that.

And I actually do think it's appropriate to put things in such stark terms. (Here's where I get all twinkly-eyed and ridiculous. Just a warning.)

When I was a kid, reading in school about presidents and Congresses and courts and all that, and history, I used to wonder - occasionally out loud - what stopped this or that president from just unilaterally overruling laws and court decisions he didn't like. Like, for example, I used to wonder why, during the 60s, John Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson didn't just say, "Oh, we'll not be having any of that segregation stuff anymore," and send the friggin' Army in to stop people from mistreating black people. Or, when I read about impeachment, about how the Congress could basically fire the president, I used to wonder what would stop the president from just saying, "Nope, I think I'll stay president." When a president had served his two terms and it came time to elect someone else, who could stop him from deciding he wanted to stay president? Who, I wondered, was going to stop him? He doesn't have a boss, in the vertical, linear sense. And nobody else in the country gets to have direct authority over the military. What stops a president from doing whatever he wants? Doesn't he basically rule the country?

Reading about and wondering about this crap, I eventually found my way to a couple of really elusive, ethereal concepts that I was terrified to discover basically amount to the entire fabric of constitutional democracy. The first is the concept of checks-and-balances, which is to say that the branches of government (the executive, the legislative, and the judicial, plus the unofficial fourth branch, the free press) are each others' bosses and each others' employees, at the same time. The other concept is even more frustrating: the concept that neither the Congress, nor the presidency, nor the courts actually rules the United States. What rules the United States - what unites them and has sovereignty over them - is Constitutional law. And the three branches of government are servants of the Constitution. Congress addresses contemporary issues by adapting the Constitution into practical legislation; the Executive enforces and upholds that legislation and defends it from the outside; the Judiciary ensures that neither the legislation nor the execution of it conflict with the Constitution. The word "Constitution" isn't what I thought it was when I was a kid: a fancy-sounding, archaic, meaningless word that basically means, "Really Important Old Piece of Paper." It means what it says: the Constitution constitutes the United States. The United States are made of the Constitution.

Of course, the Constitution is, literally, an old piece of parchment. It doesn't rule anything. So that queasy feeling you might get from thinking about this stuff might come from the fact that this blog post is a pedantic, intellectual, silly waste of time - or it might be the quiet background realization that the sovereignty of Constitutional law in this country basically boils down to an uneasy and mostly-unenforceable agreement between very powerful, very ambitious parties, any of whom could decide to test the limits of their authority at any time. This danger is embodied by the presidency: it's an office occupied by one single person, and awarded by a process that weeds out everyone but the very most single-minded, ambitious, power-hungry, obsessive lunatics in the world. And, it's an office that gives this single-minded, ambitious, power-hungry, obsessive lunatic authority over the military, the police, the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet, foreign-policymaking, and last but not least, the ability to unilaterally veto legislation on a whim. If any branch of the government were to say, "Yeah, this democracy stuff is nice, but I've decided to cancel it and give all the power to myself," it'd be the Executive branch, if only because the president doesn't really have to compromise with anybody, when you get right down to it.

But that gets me thinking about other ways in which the fabric of our society is held together by nothing more than the good faith, goodwill, and - to a depressingly large extent - inertia of individuals. If the president gives a direct order to a soldier, that soldier must obey it, says the law. But what enforces that law? The soldier has a gun, and in most cases the president doesn't. If that soldier says no, he's not going to follow that order, the law says that soldier must be arrested. If that soldier says no, he's not going to allow himself to be arrested today, what's left? Force? Getting a bigger gun? More guns than he's got? Holy shit-balls, why isn't this country ruled by roving bands of renegade soldiers, taking whatever they want? Why aren't we in a military dictatorship?

To a large extent, democratic society holds together for no greater reason than that people have a distaste for warring over every little damned thing we don't like doing. But no, things really aren't that bleak and inhuman. To an even larger extent, democratic society holds together because we just kind of have an innate sense that it has to. It should. Because we people have evolved over the centuries an understanding that ultimately, the reality that we all have to make sacrifices in order to have the peaceful, prosperous, comfortable lives we want is inescapable. Either we can make those sacrifices peacefully, by participating in a herky-jerky, wildly imperfect, bottomlessly messy democratic society that as often as not yields results that will bitterly disappoint us... or we can make those sacrifices violently, by living brutish, dangerous, blood-soaked, spiritually empty lives trying to have exactly what we want at any given moment. And, the peaceful option works better - because the secret, the ingenious subtlety that tends to hold things together, is that ultimately, all anyone really wants is peace and a sense that the world operates justly. And that reality - the paradoxical and endlessly frustrating reality that in order to have peace and justice, we can never have everything that we want, even if all we want is peace and justice all the time - applies to everyone. Even presidents.

Which, ultimately, is what this most recent Supreme Court ruling is about. Law rules, because when we 'Mericans are forced to make a decision, we tend to prefer the benevolent and cooperative sloppiness of law's rule to the horrifying and chaotic void of autocracy. And I know "autocracy" is a scary and loaded word, conjuring up images of storm troopers and thought police and rigid control, and I know the Bush administration has never lived up to these nightmare images. I'm not using that word accidentally, but literally. Autocracy denotes, quite simply, a society in which authority is consolidated in a single person. Not in a single elected office, but in a single person - and that's an important distinction. An office - even one held by a single person - has abstract but defined boundaries. When authority is consolidated in a person, rather than in an office, that individual person's whims are unbound by law. And it's neither an exaggeration nor a political attack to say that the Bush administration has advanced an autocratic notion of government since 9/11: their basic message has been that these are extraordinary times, requiring the president to be able to act quickly and unilaterally as he - and no one else - sees fit. They've advanced the notion that when existing law conflicts with the president's agenda - his self-appointed mission - his personal authority trumps the existing law.

Think about how dangerous this notion is. Suppose Barack Obama turns out to be a secret Maoist? Suppose John McCain decides he wants to lob hydrogen bombs at China, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela? Just because we might agree with a particular president's agenda doesn't change the fact that it's unforgivably irresponsible to hand over unchecked authority to him. Many of the same folks who supported George W. Bush's attempts at claiming boundless executive power would likely feel quite differently if the next president decided to use the term "enemy combatant" on, say, Christians, and ship us all off to Guantanamo Bay for some "enhanced interrogation techniques."

Which is why we have a Supreme Court: they take all this in, review it, and give it a resounding thumbs-down. (Actually, not so resounding: a 5-4 decision is hardly a thunderous statement.) There's no small amount of irony to it, either: the very least democratic branch of government - justices aren't democratically elected but rather appointed, serve for life, and are not accountable for their decisions - strikes a staggering haymaker for the rule of law. I'll take it.