Christine M. Flowers: THE COURT'S SUICIDE SQUAD

TO PARAPHRASE our only (at least for now) President Clinton: "It's the Supreme Court, Stupid."

We can talk all we want about the economy, the subprime crisis, the spike in unemployment, $5-a-gallon gas and the millions of Americans without health insurance.

We can talk about the situation in Iraq, which is showing marked improvement since the surge.

We can even talk about things like the character of the candidates, their churches, wives or book rankings on Amazon.com.

But all this pales in comparison to who gets to pick the next Supreme Court justices. If we get the wrong picker, it won't matter how expensive it becomes to drive our cars or how many of us end up living in tents or how many of us start hoarding aspirin.

If we get another set of judges like the ones who signed onto Justice Kennedy's majority opinion in Boumediene v. Bush last week, we may not even get the chance to worry about those things.

And that's because the five justices who held that the Guantanamo detainees are entitled to a full rainbow of constitutional rights, including habeas corpus, have taken it on themselves to strip the executive and Congress of the right to determine foreign policy and, more important, national security.

In other words, five unelected lawyers have figured out a way to trump both civil and military authorities by treating the separation of powers as a whimsical idea and not the bedrock of our constitutional democracy.

The detention center at Guantanamo, which can't be considered sovereign U.S. territory, situated as it is on the island of Cuba, has been housing enemy combatants since late 2001. Since they're outside the U.S., it's been the administration's position that the detainees weren't entitled to habeas, which is limited to persons in-country. Of course, to civil libertarians and Bush-haters (try to find a distinction), this is just quibbling over irrelevant details.

To them, even people who pose the most serious threat to our nation are entitled to take advantage of our constitutional protections no matter where they happen to be passing time. And if this increases the odds that they can destroy us, well, quibble, quibble.