A defining moment?

The Times calls the Supreme Court's repudiation of Dubya's tribunals:

a defining moment in the ever-shifting balance of power among branches of government that ranked with the court's order to President Richard M. Nixon in 1974 to turn over the Watergate tapes, or with the court's rejection of President Harry S. Truman's seizing of the nation's steel mills, a 1952 landmark decision from which Justice Anthony M. Kennedy quoted at length.

Dahlia Lithwick, the best writer on Slate by a mile, isn't sure we should be jumping up and down about it.

With so many illegal nasty tricks still at his disposal, why should Bush worry? Says Dahlia:

Today's rebuke to the president still feels hollow to me because I just don't believe the Bush administration cares what the Supreme Court thinks about the constraints on executive war powers. As a legal matter, Bush lawyers always claimed they'd won the last round of enemy combatant cases, even when the rest of us heard O'Connor's admonition, in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, about a state of war not being a "blank check" for the president. As a practical matter, even if it's true that U.S. forces and interrogators must now abide by the Geneva definition of torture, when is the petition for relief of a tortured detainee going to present itself before this court? And even if Guantanamo is closed, which I gather may soon happen, what is to stop Bush from falling back on secret prisons and extraordinary renditions—which we will never know about?

Chris Floyd says basically the same thing, but says it a lot more passionately, though he focuses more on how little the Pentagon thinks of the other wimpy branches of government ("the direct impact will be negligible") and on the weird dissent by Clarence Thomas, who apparently never reads his dissents aloud from the bench. This time he did, and why? So he could blast John Paul Stevens for his "unfamiliarity with the realities of warfare."

Would it surprise you dear reader (if you didn't already know, or couldn't see from a mile away), that, ahem, Stevens actually served in the Navy from '42-'45, and that Thomas "is yet another hard-right chickenhawk who never served – yet presumes to lecture a World War II vet (and Bronze Star recipient) about war's reality."