Will The Supreme Court Decision Matter?

This is a turning point.

The question remains whether the ship of state will, indeed, turn or keep plowing on, straight for the iceberg.

The St. Petersburg Times - Opinion - American Dream:

As The New Yorker reports, all laws now pass through the hands of this unelected factotum, who feverishly screens them for any possible encroachments on presidential power, then writes the 'signing statements' that Bush appends to every major piece of legislation, declaring that he will follow the new law, or not, as it suits him.

'I'm the decider,' as Bush likes to say in his cretinous playground patois. But it is Addington and Cheney who have sown the noxious weeds of tyranny that Bush so happily grazes upon.

So there was rich irony in seeing their malevolent system chastised by Stevens, a conservative Republican whose 1975 appointment by President Gerald Ford was certainly handled by Ford's powerful chief of staff: an ambitious apparatchik named Dick Cheney. And the Stevens decision would indeed be a landmark ruling, a return to sanity, if we were still in an era where the institutions of American government and society were actually functional, and officeholders felt bound by law. But if there is no political will in the American establishment to enforce the ruling, it will be nothing more than a pretty ornament for the republic's coffin.