"It's just a flesh wound."
Posted on 12/01/2011 6:19:22 AM PST by Kaslin
Can the president use the military to arrest anyone he wants, keep that person away from a judge and jury, and lock him up for as long as he wants? In the Senate's dark and terrifying vision of the Constitution, he can.
Congress is supposed to work in public. That requirement is in the Constitution. It is there because the folks who wrote the Constitution had suffered long and hard under the British Privy Council, a secret group that advised the king and ran his government. We know from the now-defunct supercommittee, and other times when Congress has locked its doors, that government loves secrecy and hates transparency. Transparency forces the government to answer to us. Secrecy lets it steal our liberty and our property behind our backs.
Last week, while our minds were on family and turkey and football, the Senate Armed Services Committee decided to meet in secret. So, behind closed doors, it drafted an amendment to a bill appropriating money for the Pentagon. The amendment would permit the president to use the military for law enforcement purposes in the United States. This, of course, would present a radical departure from any use to which the military has been put in the memory of any Americans now living.
The last time the federal government regularly used the military for domestic law enforcement was at the end of Reconstruction in the South, in 1876. In fact, the deal to end Reconstruction resulted in the enactment of federal laws forbidding the domestic use of American military for law enforcement purposes. This has been our law, our custom and our set of values to which every president has adhered for 135 years.
It is not for directing traffic that this legislation would authorize the president to use the military. Essentially, this legislation would enable the president to divert from the criminal justice system, and thus to divert from the protections of the Constitution, any person he pleases. And that person, under this terrifying bill, would have no recourse to a judge to require the president either to file charges against him or to set him free.
Can you imagine an America in which you could lose all liberty -- from the presumption of innocence to the right to counsel to fairness from the government to a jury trial -- simply because the president says you are dangerous?
Nothing terrified or animated the Founders more than that. The Founders, who wrote the Constitution, had just won a war against a king who had less power than this legislation will give to the president. But to protect their freedoms, they wrote in the Constitution the now iconic guarantee of due process. The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution says, "No person shall be ... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." Note, the Founders used the word "person." Thus, the requirement of due process must be accorded to all human beings held by the government -- not just Americans, not just nice people, but all persons. When Lincoln tried to deny this during the Civil War, the Supreme Court rejected him and held that the Constitution guarantees its protections to everyone that the government restrains, no matter the crime, no matter the charge, no matter the evidence, no matter the danger.
If this legislation becomes law, it will be dangerous for anyone to be right when the government is wrong. It will be dangerous for all of us. Just consider what any president could get away with. Who would he make disappear first? Might it be his political opponents? Might it be you?
I don’t agree with you at all. There are already scores of bills that identify support of the enemy as being its own special status in regards to National Security and for the most part it has never been abused. I do not find it to be un-Constitutional at all and in numerous occasions throughout history American citizens have even been executed without a trial for sup[porting the enemy. It is a fact of life and as usual there are many who are having knee-jerk reactions to bills meant to protect innocent Americans from another terrorist attack.
And if you do not see that then it is you who are a part of the problem. The next terrorist attack in America could be 300,000 Americans dead or even 3 million Americans dead. So you had better have more than some vague comment about how you feel that they may abuse the wording of a bill in order to lock up Americans being that we would all see it and oppose it if it was abused anyway. If you want to risk all of us to another terrorist attack by opposing every bill intended to protect us then come up with more than well this may be interpreted wrongly.
Look at the quote, that section doesn’t tag up on another bill. There are sections of the bill that refer to other bills, that part doesn’t, “support” stands undefined.
As for your running to body count, living in a free country entails risk it always has. Our entire legal system is built on the maxim that it’s better to let 100 guilty men go free than convict 1 innocent man. Which is part of the problem with this bill, it runs the exact opposite, much like your defense of it. This is not the bill of a free country, your defense of the bill is not a defense that belongs in a free country. I’d RATHER 300 MILLION dead than even 1 imprisoned indefinitely without trial for undefined “support” of an undefined enemy. If we can’t live with those ideal then we deserve to die, the enemy has already won at that point. The level of paranoia and freedom destruction you espouse is the goal of terrorism.
Again you are talking in simply platitudes but not in reality at all. Time after time we here these platitudes by those who oppose laws to prevent terrorist attacks but never any real life facts to back them up. So where is the tyranny? How did the Patriot Act create tyranny for American citizens? It didn’t. How did Gitmo create tyranny for American citizens? It didn’t. How did intercepting enemy communications coming across our borders without a warrant create tyranny for American citizens? Again it didn’t.
Time after time again Paultards, libertarians and Code Pink radicals claim that anti-terrorism laws are going to create tyranny and time after time again they never give any examples. I am sure it will be the same with this bill.
And you say that our nation is built upon allowing ten guilty men to go free in order to prevent one innocent man from being punished wrongly and again that is just a platitude. If we had that mentality then many much more innocent men and women and children would be murdered by the guilty men who were set free. Your view is pure fiction. It has always been the leftists who defend criminals (and terrorists) the way you do. They rallied for criminals suck as Mookie (or whatever the scums name was) the left is against the death penalty based upon the same logic you have just presented as well.
Your statement that you would rather see 3 million innocent Americans dead than have one innocent man imprisoned by this law is absoutely disgusting to me.
Your views come off as being rather left-wing to me. Don’t get offended, I am just being honest. I will be heading out for awhile but will check back later for your response.
It is not the Constitution or Government that grants us these rights.
A government of free men recognizes these rights. A tyrannical government does not recognize these rights.
Under our Constitution, any law Congress passes that doesn't recognize these rights SHOULD BE struck down by the courts.
The more rights that get trampled on by Congress - the more we move towards a tyrannical government and away from a government of free men.
I would have thought Judge Napolitano would have had Newt Gingrich fact check his history...
Juan McAmnesty, GO AWAY. Join the RATs, where you belong.
You heard wrong. Educate yourself.
"It's just a flesh wound."
Hamdi.
Let's be honest -- it lay at the top. GeeDubya got a memo warning him of the threat, and didn't do anything to prevent it (out of incompentence, not a deliberate conspiracy like the moonbats say, but incompetence proved to be quite bad enough).
The bottom line is that the 9/11 attacks happened because of ineptitude from top to bottom. After the fact, the inept bunglers covered their asses by making excuses, one of which was this nonsense about laws supposedly preventing them from doing their jobs.
Let me know if you ever get an answer to those questions. Of course, that's a "Big If"....
I see that there’s just no getting through your Obama-worshipping mental fog. I’ll continue to rebut your nonsense for the benefit of lurking readers, but I don’t expect you to ever see reason.
He refuses to answer that.
Well, imho, that puts every taxpayer in the 'support' group.
If people were honest, they'd openly admit they have far more to fear from the swarms of federal regulators and their volumes of things they can gig you for than some raghead with a car bomb.
Instead of closing the d@mned border, they were (are?) arming the cartels!
When they do close it, it will be to keep us in, not them out ('they' will already be here).
Exactly, the government is not our friends, it’s not on our side, and is a hell of a lot more interested in juicing money from us than protecting us.
Look who is using DU talking points…. You.
President Bush did not receive any memo warning of the threat at all. It is pure left-wing propaganda to claim so as you do. He had asked for information regarding such matters and received a daily brief answering these inquiries (and not a warning as you and your left-wing talking points claim).
Then the next two obnoxious posts of yours that act as if attacks on President Bush blaming him for 9/11 are the conservative position here at FR are just beyond the pale and are telling in exposing your extreme left-wing position.
How does not following a so-called tip or having loopholes in getting VISAs prove that 9/11 could not have been prevented with a better legal framework and better laws?
How does it in anyway at all prove that the ‘WALL’ of seperation between intelligence agencies did nto cause the failure?
It does not at all so you really have no point at all.
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