President Barack Obama today nominated U.S. District Judge Henry Floyd for a vacancy on a federal appeals court, selecting a judge who had a key role in challenges to President George W. Bush’s system of indefinite detention.
Floyd, of South Carolina, gained nationwide attention for a 2005 ruling in which he wrote that Bush exceeded his authority when he held a U.S. citizen, José Padilla, without charges. Padilla was arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport in 2002, and the Bush administration detained him as an “enemy combatant,” which Floyd ruled it could not do.
