"John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it."

That's what Andrew Jackson said in response to the Supreme Court's decision that Jackson's Indian Removal Act of 1830 was unconstitutional.

174 years later another president decides he's powerful enough to ignore the constitution and defy the Supreme Court.

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba, Oct. 31 - From the moment the Bush administration decided to use the naval base here as a prison colony for accused terrorists, policy makers were determined to keep everything that went on here beyond the reach of United States courts.

But a decision by the Supreme Court in June seemed to upset those plans as the justices ruled that prisoners at Guantánamo were entitled to some rights, notably the ability to have their claims that they were wrongfully imprisoned heard by a federal judge. But what the justices meant as to how far the government must go to accommodate the Guantánamo prisoners has produced a sharp debate now being played out in lower courts.

Lawyers for many of the detainees, including the ones named in the Supreme Court ruling, say the Bush administration is purposely ignoring the justices' mandate and stalling.

They cite the government's refusal to acknowledge that detainees are entitled to free access to lawyers to make their cases before federal judges. More broadly, they argue that the government is still trying to argue issues it has already lost in the Supreme Court, especially that the detainees have full rights to challenge their detentions in lower federal courts.

The Justice Department responded to demands by the detainees' lawyers with language remarkably similar to that it used almost two years ago in the case it has already lost.

"The notion that the U.S. Constitution affords due process and other rights to enemy aliens captured abroad and confined outside the sovereign territory of the United States is contrary to law and history," a recent government brief asserts, in an echo of the briefs submitted in the original Supreme Court case.

Thomas Wilner, a lawyer for several detainees who were involved in the original lawsuit, said in his brief that the government's motion was "simply outrageous.''

"It is filed in direct violation of the federal rules and it simply rehashes the same arguments that were made before, and rejected by the Supreme Court," Mr. Wilner said.

He compared the government's behavior to the "massive resistance" urged by some Southerners in response to the court's landmark desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.

If memory serves, Jackson won the popular and electoral vote (and still lost the election the first time he ran). By contrast, Bush is defying the same Supreme Court that elected him four years ago.

I can't help but wonder what the Bush administration's response will be should they lose in tomorrow's election. I don't think it will be pretty, even if Kerry wins by a significant percentage. These guys simply refuse to accept anything that doesn't agree with them, whether that be the law, the Consitution, or, of course, reality.