A Power He Didn't Really Like

Was there ever an executive power that President Bush wasn't eager to take for a spin? The answer may be yes -- the one the Supreme Court denied him yesterday.

After all, in the case in question, Bush was asserting his right to use a World Court opinion to beat his beloved Texas into obliging a Mexican rapist and murderer on death row. Given Bush's longstanding hostility to international institutions and his energetic support of the death penalty, you got the distinct impression his heart wasn't in it.

Robert Barnes writes in The Washington Post: "The Supreme Court yesterday issued a broad ruling limiting presidential power and the reach of international treaties, saying neither President Bush nor the World Court has the authority to order a Texas court to reopen a death penalty case involving a foreign national.

"The justices held 6 to 3 that judgments of the International Court of Justice, as the court is formally known, are not binding on U.S. courts and that Bush's 2005 executive order that courts in Texas comply anyway does not change that."

As David G. Savage writes in the Los Angeles Times, Bush's intervention three years ago was "a surprise move."

It also split his Cabinet. Peter Baker writes in The Washington Post: "Bush's decision to issue the order to Texas came after a vigorous internal debate shortly after the beginning of his second term. . . . Bush had appointed his White House counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, as attorney general and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, as secretary of state, and the two quickly found themselves on opposite sides of the case. . . .

"A series of phone calls and meetings between Rice and Gonzales and their aides produced a compromise -- Bush would issue the order to Texas but withdraw the United States from the particular protocol of the convention at issue to keep such circumstances from happening again. 'It was a tough decision for the president,' the official said. 'This was his home state.'"

Mark Sherman writes for the Associated Press: "The president was in the unusual position of siding with Medellin, a Mexican citizen whom police prevented from consulting with Mexican diplomats, as provided by international treaty.

"An international court ruled in 2004 that the convictions of Medellin and 50 other Mexicans on death row around the United States violated the 1963 Vienna Convention, which provides that people arrested abroad should have access to their home country's consular officials. The International Court of Justice, also known as the world court, said the Mexican prisoners should have new court hearings to determine whether the violation affected their cases.

"Bush, who oversaw 152 executions as Texas governor, disagreed with the decision. But he said it must be carried out by state courts because the United States had agreed to abide by the world court's rulings in such cases. The administration argued that the president's declaration is reason enough for Texas to grant Medellin a new hearing."

Linda Greenhouse writes in the New York Times that the Supreme Court, "in a majority opinion by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., concluded that the treaty at issue, the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, was not 'self-executing' -- that is, that it did not automatically become binding domestic law upon its ratification in 1969. Consequently, only the president and Congress working together to enact further legislation, and not the president alone, could make the treaty enforceable against the states, the court said.

"'The president has an array of political and diplomatic means available to enforce international obligations,' Chief Justice Roberts said, 'but unilaterally converting a non-self-executing treaty into a self-executing one is not among them.' He added, 'It should not be surprising that our Constitution does not contemplate vesting such power in the executive alone.'"