Just in case Republicans still wonder why the GOP routinely garners less than 10% of the African-American vote, the reactions of some of their leading lights to the Supreme Court's Guantanamo detainee decision should provide a quick reminder. While John McCain Friday simply called the Court's Boumediene ruling "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country," right-wing legal analyst David Rivkin and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich were much more specific. The Court's restoration of habeas corpus, they insist, is worse than the infamous Dred Scott slavery case which helped precipitate the Civil War.
Rivkin made his case Thursday on the PBS News Hour. The former Justice Department official under the first President Bush and full-time apologist for the current one blasted the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling in favor of Guantanamo Bay detainees. The result, he proclaimed, was the equivalent of declaring human beings property and codifying racial segregation:

"But to be honest, and not to be too dramatic, it's one of the worst decisions by the Supreme Court I've ever read, on par with Dred Scott decisions and Plessy v. Ferguson.
The reason for it is not because of its practical implications; they're quite modest. But the sheer ambition, the sheer judicial arrogance that you see here."

On Sunday, Gingrich followed suit. Appearing on Face the Nation, the Georgian showed that the good times there are not forgotten. Boumediene, he claimed, "could cost us a city." And, he insisted, the Court's 2008 Gitmo decision made the 1857 Dred Scott calamity pale in significance:

Mr. GINGRICH: On the other hand, I will say, the recent Supreme Court decision to turn over to a local district judge decisions of national security and life and death that should be made by the president and the Congress is the most extraordinarily arrogant and destructive decision the Supreme Court has made in its history.
REID: In its history.
Mr. GINGRICH: In its history. Worse than Dred Scott, worse than - because - for this following reason: The court has now knowingly stepped in - and this morning's newspapers say smugglers had actually gotten the design of a nuclear weapon, that we now have the evidence that people out there had a nuclear weapon design. And this court is saying that any random district judge, based on whatever their personal caprice is, whatever their personal ideological bias, can intervene with a terrorist in such a way - and this is something that the Italians will tell you about fighting the mafia.

Of course, Gingrich and Rivkin are not alone among the voices of the right in equating Boumediene with Dred Scott. The Wall Street Journal's Law Blog echoed the editorial page's conclusion that "we can say with confident horror that Americans are likely to die as a result" and asked readers to weigh in on "what you think are the worst Supreme Court decisions in the history of this country."
On the Saturday, the good people at Huffington Post were thoughtful enough to provide John McCain and his frothing-at-the-mouth followers a guide to the worst rulings in the history of the United States Supreme Court. No doubt the effort will be in vain. For those on the right, allowing detainees held by the United States the opportunity to challenge their detentions is worse than keeping millions of Americans in the bonds of slavery.
UPDATE: George Will weighs in, offering a history lesson for McCain and friends in a piece titled, "Contempt of Court."