The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 yesterday that the government can ban even “humanitarian” assistance to terrorist organizations. Eugene Volokh’s got a good summary post here, and you can click on the main site for quite a few more takes on the decision and read this short summary from Elliott Abrams.

What was most interesting to me is how the justices aligned on this one. Liberal stalward Justice John Paul Stevens joined Anthony Kennedy and the court’s conservative block (note the distancing of Kennedy from “conservative”) against Justices Breyer, Ginsburg and Sotomayor.

I’d like to think that Stevens joined the majority because of his military background – Stevens served in the Navy during WWII – he better understands people that want to kill us. But how would one reconcile that view with the one Stevens and his liberal cohort propogated in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which basically claimed that by signing the Geneva Conventions we’d approved a treaty with terrorist organizations?

Is this current case simply a bridge too far for Stevens? If it is, one wonders exactly how much further Breyer, Sotomayor and Ginsberg would extend terrorists’ rights.