Political Quotes

“I rise today to correct the public record with regard to a matter raised by the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 126 S.Ct. 2749 (2006). In part II of its opinion, the majority in Hamdan addressed whether the Detainee Treatment Act barred Hamdan's lawsuit from proceeding in its then-present form. As the court noted, the DTA provides that ``no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider'' claims filed by Guantanamo detainees, except under the review standards created by that act. In the course of drafting the DTA conference language regarding jurisdiction, Senator Kyl, myself, and several others we consulted, specifically relied on the Bruner line of cases for guidance. In that line of cases, we had taken particular note of Justice Stevens's opinion in Landgraf, where, in discussing the Bruner line, he wrote that the Court had a consistent practice of ordering an action dismissed when the jurisdictional statute under which that action had been filed was subsequently repealed. Since that was precisely what we were doing in the DTA, reversing the Rasul finding of jurisdiction through the habeas statute, we were very comfortable with how our language addressed the jurisdictional change. Likewise, the Bruner/Landgraf line of cases informed the enactment language regarding the substantive law changes we were making.…”