A leading Republican senator Monday said he will fight to give detainees the right to challenge their imprisonment, creating a new potential obstacle for legislation President Bush wants in order to try terrorism suspects.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter said he would join Democrats working to amend a bill setting up trial procedures for foreign terrorism suspects that Republican leaders are trying to push through Congress this week.
As it now stands, the bill, which the White House was forced to negotiate with a group of Senate Republicans, would bar inmates held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, from using habeas corpus petitions to challenge the legality of their detentions.
“I believe it is unconstitutional to take away habeas corpus,” Specter of Pennsylvania told reporters after a hearing with a panel of experts who were divided on the issue.
“I think if it goes back to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court will teach Congress another lesson which they do with some frequency,” Specter said.
Habeas corpus -- the phrase in Latin for “you have the body” -- has been a centerpiece of Anglo-American jurisprudence since it was first developed over 300 years ago in Britain. It gave defendants the right to have their imprisonment reviewed by a court.
While Specter said he would try to amend the bill, he said he would not use procedural tools to block it and he would decide later how he would vote on it.
Bush and top Republicans want Congress to pass the bill by the end of this week, before lawmakers head out to campaign for Nov. 7 elections that will determine control of Congress.
The administration and a number of Republicans contend that petitions from detainees, mostly picked up in the Afghanistan war, have clogged courts and have been a distraction from the war on terrorism.
Bush needs Congress to pass legislation after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down his original plan for trying the detainees, saying it failed to meet U.S. judicial standards.
The White House reached a compromise on the bill last week with a group of Republican senators led by John McCain of Arizona, who said Bush’s original proposal would permit unfair trials and interrogations that bordered on torture.
While human rights groups see the compromise as an improvement over the original bill, critics say it still has many shortcomings, including stripping habeas corpus rights.
“This provision perpetuates the indefinite detention of hundreds of individuals against whom the government has brought no charges and presented no evidence, and without any recourse to justice whatsoever,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the committee’s senior Democrat.
But Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn said military panels that review detainees’ status and limited access to appeals courts would give “unlawful combatants detained at Guantanamo Bay ... all the process that they were due.”