WASHINGTON, June 11 (UPI) -- After a short spring nap in the shade of the media mountain, the Supreme Court of the United States is on the brink of an old-fashioned, certified news avalanche.
You haven't heard much about the Supreme Court lately, have you? What with the mess in Iraq, the presidential campaign, the White House memo on torture, the death of President Ronald Reagan and the death of Ray Charles, perhaps the greatest blues and pop singer ever recorded.
Get ready for a sea change.
It happens every year around this time, when the most controversial cases get bunched up at the end of the term -- which will come in late June or early July -- and sometimes are decided on one or two days in a clump that's almost impossible for the public to digest.
We're talking, of course, about the Pledge of Allegiance case -- whether the 1950s inclusion of the phrase "under God" will survive as constitutional -- and the three detention cases: the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay; an apparent U.S. citizen of Saudi heritage, Yaser Esam Hamdi, captured in Afghanistan, and an undoubted U.S. citizen arrested on U.S. soil, Jose Padilla.
Our predictions, which we've made several times to make sure we're sticking our neck out, are that the court will find the phrase "under God" of such little impact that it flies under the constitutional radar, that the Guantanamo Bay detainees and Hamdi have no right of access to the U.S. courts, but that Jose Padilla, despite the gravity of the government's allegations, certainly does.
There has been a lot of speculation in the media about whether the news breaking outside the Supreme Court will affect its final decisions.
The justices surely will take note in at least one opinion of the detainee-abuse allegations against the U.S. military, but that won't weigh in their decision. The issue in the three cases, after all, is what rights the detainees have, not whether those rights or the principles of human decency are being violated.
Nor will the justices be swayed by the argument that U.S. prisoners are more harshly treated -- tortured and killed -- than any detainee in U.S. custody. Again, the issue is what rights prisoners in U.S. hands possess, not whether some abuse balance sheet is tragically out of whack.
As for Padilla, the Justice Department has been doing its best to show what a bad guy he is.
If you remember, Padilla was arrested by the FBI in May 2002 at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. At the time, Attorney General John Ashcroft said Padilla was returning from consultations with al-Qaida leaders and was scouting out U.S. cities for the best place to detonate a "dirty" bomb -- radioactive material wrapped around a conventional explosive device.
Though he started out in FBI hands, he was quickly designated an "enemy combatant" by the president and turned over to the Pentagon. Since then, like Hamdi and the Guantanamo detainees, he has been held virtually incommunicado, allowed visits with court-appointed lawyers only at the insistence of a federal judge.
At the request of Senate Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, the Justice Department released other details about Padilla's case several weeks ago. The department says Padilla was deeply involved in al-Qaida planning, was trained to blow up an apartment building using a buildup of natural gas and wanted to detonate a nuclear device in the United States.
Altogether, a real evildoer.
Some of my colleagues on the Supreme Court beat have been sniffing about the timing of the department's release, saying the executive branch might be trying to influence the outcome of the Supreme Court case.
Nonsense. The department probably knows it's likely to lose the case. The release of Padilla's alleged sins was designed as a political move, one designed to justify his treatment so far.
But it is extremely unlikely, in my view, that even this Supreme Court, normally so diffident toward a government at war, will tolerate the arrest of a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil without some review by the U.S. courts -- no matter how evil that citizen is.
As far as I can see, this president has not abused the "enemy combatant" designation. But try to imagine a future president, one less sensitive to public condemnation, with the same power to jail any U.S. citizen indefinitely without charge simply by designating that citizen an "enemy combatant." And the U.S. courts, as the Bush administration contends, would have no jurisdiction to review that detention.
They call that a dictatorship.
Many of the other cases yet to be decided this term -- there are about 18 -- are also of significant importance, but they won't receive the coverage of those four.
And while we're talking about the legacy of the October 2003 term (the 2004 term begins next October), let's not overlook the decision on the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, sometimes called McCain-Feingold.
BCRA purports to ban soft money from federal campaigns.
Lest we forget, "soft" money is unregulated but is not supposed to be spent directly in a campaign or in coordination with a campaign. "Hard" money contributions are strictly regulated and limited and can be spent directly in a campaign.
The Supreme Court heard the BCRA argument in an extraordinary session last September -- technically part of the 2002 term. But the justices handed down their decision last December in the middle of the current 2003 term.
Though the nine members of the court were all over the map, the central holding upheld much of BCRA.
And the upshot of that, of course, is that a number of groups on the Democratic side have found a loophole and are spending tens of millions of "soft" dollars to defeat President George W. Bush.
I tell the powers that be at United Press International -- as I told actress Sally Field a couple of years ago while working hard to flirt with her in the Supreme Court pressroom -- that the decisions of the justices have more of an effect on how people live their lives than any of the decisions made in the White House or Congress.
But the BCRA case demonstrates that some days you get the bear, and some days the bear gets you.
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(Mike Kirkland is UPI's senior legal affairs correspondent. He has been embedded with the Supreme Court since 1993.)
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