George III and George W. Bush

Thursday's House of Lords ruling striking down indefinite detention of foreign detainees by the UK government drew considerable attention in the US media, or at least those parts of the US media not devoting themselves to covering the Secret Plot to Ban Christmas. Anyway, legal scholars rushed to explain that the UK ruling has quite different implications from a comparable US ruling, because in the UK, the executive branch is dominant and can always use its parliamentary majority to override even the highest court in the land. In other words, Blair's government can just ignore the ruling and continue indefinite detentions.

But the US is different -- if, hypothetically, the Supreme Court was to rule that indefinite detention of foreigners was unconstitutional, the executive branch couldn't just ignore it, right? Except, that's exactly what they are doing. This Slate article from just a couple of days ago explains how the Justice Department is completely ignoring the last year's Supreme Court rulings, which struck down open-ended detentions of both US citizens and foreigners:

Justice Department lawyers, though, have spent the following months telling lower courts that the Supreme Court's action was not at all unfavorable to the government or to its claim to unchecked presidential authority. Any ambiguity, or any seeming opening, in what the court did in June has been routinely described as supportive of the commander in chief.

The calendar says it's 2004. But the nation's ruler is following the model of 1775. Minus the imminent revolution.

UPDATE, for filing under "Great Minds..." -- reader CS brings to our attention that James Wolcott blogs about the analogy between Dubya and a royal George, although Wolcott sees it re George IV, the one who came after the mad one. We had also noted a while back Dubya's tendency towards royalist terminology, and specifically his Queen's Speech usage of "my government."