9th Circuit Tells the WLB to Go Fuck Himself

[TheRealJoeFish]

Circuit court justices do not receive national security briefs.

While this is true, stating this flatly and without context misses two important points:

1) As the Court noted in its Opinion, the President was certainly within his rights to provide the court with classified information upon which his decisions were based.  The Court would have had to keep this confidential.  That the President didn't do this means that he either a) didn't actually have classified information he believed would be helpful to his cause or b) he didn't trust the confidentiality procedures of the 9th Circuit court (which would be a mind-boggling level of paranoia) or otherwise wasn't prepared to submit this information for in camera review.  That's his choice.

2) The statement suggests the existence of instances that are unreviewable, inasmuch as it implies the existence of situations in which some document/file/information X is needed to understand the constitutionality of a governmental decision, but the arbiters of constitutionality may not see X, and therefore the constitutionality of the decision *cannot effectively* be reviewed.  This is simply not the law, and if true would allow the President, any time a decision of his is challenged, to say "I have a *confidential* reason why I'm doing this, and if you (the Court) could see that, you would agree it's constitutional."  (Which, I shouldn't need to say, is absurd.)