From The Seattle Times
By Leonard Pitts Jr.

With apologies to the makers of the 1994 film, it has never been “the madness of King George” that troubled me.

No, it was the arrogance, a hubris so awesome and awful you tended to forget George is not, in fact, a king but a president. One might have been forgiven for forgetting, since President George W. Bush has governed much as a King George would have: by fiat and decree.

So the Supreme Court’s recent rebuke of the Bush administration and the administration’s chastened acceptance of same comes like spring air into a musty room.

Frankly, the substance of the rebuke is of secondary importance to me, though I will recount it here. Late last month, the high court, on a 5-3 vote (Chief Justice John Roberts did not participate), ruled that the president could not, of his sole authority, put detainees at Guantánamo Bay on trial before a military tribunal. The court found that the effort to do so violated both international law and federal statutes, a stinging rejection of the White House’s attempt to expand executive authority.

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