The High Court gets another one right

From The Washington Post:

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.

It placed the president on the side of Ernesto Medell¿n, a brutal murderer, and the rulings of the World Court, and against the authority of his home state's courts.

Texas's high court had rejected the World Court's judgment that it "review and reconsider" Medell¿n's conviction because he is a Mexican national and was not advised after his arrest that he could meet with a consular from his country, as the Vienna Convention requires.

Even though the administration disagreed with the World Court's decision -- and has withdrawn from the international pact that gave it force -- Bush nonetheless issued a memorandum ordering the Texas courts to rehear Medell¿n's case.

But Roberts wrote that neither the Optional Protocol of the Vienna Convention nor the operative part of the United Nations Charter creates binding law in the absence of implementing legislation from Congress.

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.

President Bush has always been the willing bitch of whichever corrupt graftocrat happens to be the current president of Mexico. Unfortunately John McCain's entire record on US/Mexico relations indicates that if he is elected nothing will change.

Fortunately we have a conservative majority on the Supreme Court which will last even if two or three justices retire over the next four years.

Catching up with the times

From The New York Times:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 — President Bush reversed a decades-old ban on nuclear cooperation with India on Monday, signing legislation allowing the United States to sell civilian nuclear fuel and technology to India for the first time since that country tested a nuclear device in 1974.

Mr. Bush, who has taken a hard line against nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea, negotiated the atomic energy pact during a visit to India in March, and Congress approved the measure shortly before adjourning this month. In return for access to American technology, India must now open its nuclear program to international inspection.

“This is an important achievement for the whole world,” Mr. Bush said during a signing ceremony in the East Room of the White House. “After 30 years outside the system, India will now operate its civilian nuclear program under internationally accepted guidelines, and the whole world is going to be safer as a result.”

Critics say the pact will open the door to nuclear proliferation. Representative Edward J. Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat who has been a leading opponent of the bill, said it “may well become the death warrant to the international nuclear nonproliferation regime.”

It should. The "international nuclear nonproliferation regime" is based upon a flawed concept. The "regime" attempts to keep any nation which currently does not possess nuclear weapons from acquiring them.

The flaw is this. Not every nation is irresponsible yet the nonproliferation regime them as though they were. India is a civilized nation which offers no threat to any other civilized nation. The only people who need feel threatened by India's nuclear arsenal are the Islamic fanatics who always seem to hover a hair's breadth away from the taking over the levers of power in Pakistan.

The only people threatened by Israel's nuclear weapons are the Arab/Muslim tyrants who have the stated goal of "pushing the Jews into the sea" and the nukes of NATO nations were only ever aimed at communist targets.

The people who we ought to fear having atomic weapons are the "bad-guy" states like Iran and North Korea. To devote the same efforts to keeping nukes out of the hands of the good guys as we do to keeping them from the bad guys all in the name of avoiding "hypocrisy" is a moronic wast of time.

The fact is that a nuclear armed Japan and South Korea would do wonders for damping Communist China's ambitions to establish hegemony in the Asian sphere and would effectively pull Kim Jong-il's fangs. Just as putting the former Soviet satellites under the NATO nuclear umbrella significantly limits the damage that a newly totalitarian Russia can inflict on the world.

The fact is that weapons in the right hands (doesn't matter if we are talking about a nuclear tipped ICBM in a silo in Nebraska or a .38 handgun tucked into the purse of a nurse who has to go to her car in a dark parking lot at 1:00 AM) are a force for good in the world.

It is past time that the civilized world abandon nonproliferation in favor of targeted proliferation.