1115.org

Apparentlym President Bush can’t just order anyone in the country to do anything he wants just because he’s president. It seems that, despite Bush’s governing philosophy for the last seven years, there are limits to presidential power. And we’re being told this by none other than Bush’s own captive Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court yesterday issued a broad ruling limiting presidential power and the reach of international treaties, saying neither President Bush nor the World Court has the authority to order a Texas court to reopen a death penalty case involving a foreign national.

The justices held 6 to 3 that judgments of the International Court of Justice, as the court is formally known, are not binding on U.S. courts and that Bush’s 2005 executive order that courts in Texas comply anyway does not change that.

The decision, written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., was a rebuke to the government in a case that involved the powers of all three branches of government, the intricacies of treaties and the international debate over the death penalty.
[…]
And he wrote that the government had not made the case that Bush had the power to issue a directive that “reaches deep into the heart of the state’s police powers and compels state courts to reopen final criminal judgments and set aside neutrally applicable state laws.”

Joining Roberts were the justices who are most consistently conservative: Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

Roberts-Scalia-Thomas-Alito slapping down George Bush? Never thought I’d live to see that. But now that I have, all kinds of thoughts are running through my head. Suppose Bush also doesn’t have the power to order all kinds of other things he has cheerfully ordered? Instructing ex-White-House employees not to testify before Congress despite having been served with subpoenas, for example.