'He Saved Hundreds of Thousands of Lives'

Antonin Scalia defends '24', via Rush & Molloy:

It's hard to picture Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in his Barcalounger watching "24."

But the jurist is a fan, and he leapt to the defense of the show's character Jack Bauer at a recent international conference of top judges and homeland security officials in Ottawa debating the use of torture against alleged terrorists.

Scalia chafed when Canadian federal Judge Richard Mosley remarked, "Thankfully, security agencies in all our countries do not subscribe to the mantra, 'What would Jack Bauer do?'"

Bauer, who's played by Kiefer Sutherland, is rough on suspects, saying things like, "You are going to tell me what I want to know - it's just a matter of how much you want it to hurt."

"Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles!" Scalia blasted at the Administration of Justice and National Security in Democracies conference. "He saved hundreds of thousands of lives!

"Are you going to convict Jack Bauer? Say that criminal law is against him? Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don't think so!"

Scalia said that, in times of crisis, law enforcement needs latitude in dealing with terrorists. He was not moved by arguments that some prisoners, in places such as Guantanamo Bay, may be innocent.

"I don't care about holding people. I really don't," Judge Scalia added.

Other judges said that allowing torture is "a slippery slope" and noted that coerced confessions don't hold up in court anyway.

It didn't help Scalia's mood when another Canadian, human-rights lawyer Stanley Cohen, asked: "How many people are we going to torture to save L.A.?"

The session broke, and Scalia was still talking about the show. "There's a great scene where he told a guy that he was going to have his family killed," he said. "They had it on closed-circuit television - and it was all staged. ... They really didn't kill the family."

Sutherland is in Romania filming "Mirrors." Spokesmen for the Supreme Court and Fox wouldn't comment.

A Few Must-Reads

-- The Washington Post, hardly a lapdog of the president, absolutely eviscerates Madam Speaker Pelosi's diplomatic adventures in Syria.

-- In a "loosely scientific" analysis, Radar details The New York Times' top 10 most error-prone reporters. In rather biting fashion, to boot.

-- Robert Tracinski says the Supreme Court ruled Monday that "the EPA is obliged to treat every substance on earth as a pollutant to be regulated, unless it can demonstrate why that substance is not a pollutant." Well, just the ones involved in any part of the economy, anyway.

The Supremes' Green Dreams

Five members of the Supreme Court ruled Monday that an unelected federal bureaucracy must regulate -- or, failing that, explain clearly why it will not -- the emission of carbon dioxide, a gas that human beings exhale with every breath. How this will play out is anyone's guess.

The Wall Street Journal speculates:

The ruling means the EPA must regulate automobile emissions unless that agency can show the science of global warming, or the potential harm it may cause, are too uncertain to justify action. The Bush EPA will no doubt be sued whatever it does. Congress will also dive in with more regulation, if only to clear up the legal uncertainty.

Cato's Patrick Michaels expounds on the ruling's ominous implications:

The implications may be quite staggering. The decision means that carbon dioxide qualifies as a 'pollutant', something that causes net harm. This surely will open up a massive number of subsidiary cases. What levels of carbon dioxide emissions, if any, are allowed without being labeled pollutants? There is very little in our society that does not have some relationship to the production of carbon dioxide. Make no mistake -- we have now entered the era where the courts will enter into almost every aspect of our lives.

The last I checked, the Constitution was designed specifically to prevent unaccountable, distant bureaucracies from imposing rules on Americans. Yet the EPA has essentially just been given a green-light to control every facet of American life. This can't be constitutional.

Then again, what do I know? I'm not a Supreme Court justice.

Related commentary:

Jonathan Adler: Hot Times in the High Court
The Wall Street Journal: Jolly Green Justices
Henry Payne: The Green Supremes