Attack update: June 29, 2006

The attack: “I think some people are probably laughing at us [after the Supreme Court’s Hamdan decision]. This is ridiculous and outrageous. … This is not a bunch of pussycats we’re talking about here. These are people that have made it clear in many instances that they would kill Americans if they got out. This is Osama bin Laden’s driver. And this is one other example of why the American people have lost faith in so much of our federal judiciary. This is a very bad decision in my opinion.”
—Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., commenting on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (Court ruled that military commissions set up by the Bush administration for trying detainees at Guantanamo Bay violated the Geneva Conventions).

Significance: For dramatic effect, we omitted this part of Lott’s comment: “Now in legal speak, let me say, I have not read the entire opinion, nor the dissents. But preliminarily my opinion is they probably didn’t even have jurisdiction. They shouldn’t have ruled the way they did.” (Emphasis added.)

Lott’s comment exposes the gaping hole in the attack on “judicial activism.” Critics of the courts have developed a results-oriented attack that focuses only on which way a court decides a case, ignoring the careful reasoning that goes into judicial decision-making. Lott’s attack follows this pattern, as he condemns a court decision even though he admits he has not read the reasons given for the decision.