Senator Arlen Specter: One Heck of a Squash Player

Here’s another excellent article from Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker. It’s about the role played by Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), outgoing chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, with respect to the recent habeas corpus legislation (aka the Military Commissions Act of 2006).
If you’re confused about the controversy over this legislation, which has wound its way through both the federal courts and the Senate chamber, the article is well worth your time. It explains recent developments in this complex area of law with commendable clarity.
And it also contains fun bits of color and gossip. We collect a few highlights, after the jump.


About communications between the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Defense Department over the treatment of enemy combatants:

[A]s Specter put it, “We still had discussions with the Department of Defense—perhaps in part because the general counsel was interested in a judgeship—but they didn’t go anywhere.”

That general counsel, of course, was William J. Haynes — whose controversial nomination to the Fourth Circuit now lies in limbo.
In speaking with the New Yorker, Senator Specter echoed the remarks he made earlier this year before the Federalist Society:

“I was madder than hell when the habeas-corpus amendment went down and was a little hot and spoke prematurely on the vote,” Specter told me. “If we had not passed the bill, we would be going on into next year without having a procedure to try these people.” Thus, he said, he felt obligated to vote for the bill.

Finally, here’s Toobin on Specter’s squash game:

[Senator Specter] still bears the scars of his years as a bruiser on the squash court—Senator Robert Packwood once gave him a swat that took six stitches to close—but he now plays more of a finesse game, built around a deadly drop shot. I won our first game, 16–14, but Specter took the next three, to win the match. He plays the same old-school, hardball version of the game as the capital’s other celebrated septuagenarian squash enthusiast, Donald Rumsfeld, but the two men have never met on the court.

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This is just the tip of the iceberg. To read the article in full, click here.
Killing Habeas Corpus: Arlen Specter’s About-Face [New Yorker]
Earlier: From the Belly of the Beast: Sen. Arlen Specter

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