Posted on 01/02/2012 12:40:09 PM PST by cold666pack
What a way to celebrate the 220th Anniversary of the Bill of Rights. Each member of Congress, before assuming office, took an oath swearing to protect the Constitution, yet here we now have a Congress which has instead decided to ignore the fact that they are guardians of the Constitution. Instead they have approved an act which now permits indefinite detention of anyone deemed a terrorist in America.... Essentially, Congress has granted the President the power to ignore the Bill of Rights and detain Americans without due process.
So, a brief recap, since terrorists threaten the lovely liberties we wrap ourselves up with at night to keep warm, we now must rip this liberty blanket off or the terrorists win.
(snip)
Conservatives love to wax poetic about having a healthy disdain for big government. Yet, there has been not a single peep about this handing even more power over to this President, even though President Obama has presided over the greatest growth of big government since FDR. Why should we believe that a president under whose watch we now are dealing with Fast and Furious, a president who has been perfectly fine ordering the dissemination of guns to Mexican drug lords, that have eventually killed American citizens, all in an effort to institute gun regulation, suddenly has a problem with being given the power to indefinitely detain anyone who he deems is a terrorist?
Americans fail to identify the irony of what just happened yesterday. That to protect the freedoms the terrorists hate us for, we must shred them, one by one. Yesterday, Congress assured a remarkable double feat of ensuring America will never do anything to avert terrorism while breathing life into the illusion that eroding the constitution in order to keep Americans safe will.
(Excerpt) Read more at examiner.com ...
Every lawmaker that voted Yes on this bill should be brought up on treason...toss in Obama for good measure.
Here are some alternative looks at the bill:
http://www.lawfareblog.com/2011/12/ndaa-faq-a-guide-for-the-perplexed/
http://www.thepeoplesview.net/2011/12/rest-of-what-senator-levin-said.html
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/12/11/1044215/-The-Rest-of-What-Levin-Said-on-NDAA-Provisions
And Marco Rubio, respected as a true defender of US liberty here, defends it:
http://government.brevardtimes.com/2011/12/senator-marco-rubio-defends-ndaa.html
Which brings up the essential question - if Congress passes an unconstitutional law, is it valid?
The law these days operates with blinders so severe they look like welder's goggles. As long as the immediately-previous legal link is remotely justifiable, the progression of law-creation proceeds unabated.
But we're at the point where the passengers are being ordered off the ship into the sea during a storm because theory predicts the ship will weather the storm better without passengers. All the t's are crossed and the i's are dotted, and the captain has the order in his hand - but no one is asking what the purpose of the ship is.
Thanks for the Rubio comments. They are, I have to say, the clearest defense I have read on this issue and it’s a shame they were not better publicized.
And....
Department Of Homeland Security Scanning Twitter and Facebook For “Sensitive Words”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2827356/posts
For all you Facebook junkies out there...lol
No
Because the Ends justify the Means, like any good police state.
The problem is once one is taken away in the dark of night and put into some gulog, how does one petition to get a release citing the law being unconstitutional? Just like with the Oturd candidacy issues, no one will be found to have standing.
Add on top of this one the change to the freedom of information act wherein the government can now lie about having records of your arrest and we have truly arrived under the axe of the sheriff of Nottingham without recourse.
And the thing is, people do not understand that this Bill would not have passed in its current form if Congressmen and women we honor as true defenders of American liberty didnt support it. That would seem to suggest, some think, that they have declared war on the Constitution and all of them, even guys like Rubio or Allen West are now traitors-but only if you didnt really read the bill and see that it explicitly and implicitly doesnt give the govt any new powers with regards to detaining US citizens. Illegal aliens and non-citizens are another story-but as others have mentioned, that is partly to protect them from unfair trials. A detainee would still be able to contest their status and declare before the Supreme Court that it’s unconstitutional-as they have done SUCCESSFULLY in the past.
And as said before, as much as we often deem Obama to be unreliable, there is a reason why in his signing statement he said, in no uncertain terms, that he wont authorize indefinite detention of US citizens. Even he knows the ramifications of that,
Thanks for trying to inject some realism into one of these threads. Most will ignore it.
More interesting is how some frightened posters here are now adopting the same kind of paranoia that alarmist liberals at salon.som or daily kos or reddit.com have and so are now on the same side-hence why I posted stuff from conservative and liberal sides encouraging people to read the bill carefully before saying that even conservative members of Congress have somehow said that they no longer care about the Constitution.
Has the ACLU been heard from yet? They seem to have standing for everything.
The Truth About the New Detainee Policy in the NDAA
by Justin Amash on Friday, December 16, 2011 at 4:57pm
The key to subsection 1021(e) is its claim that sec. 1021 does not affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of persons arrested on U.S. soil. If the Presidents expansive view of his own power were in statute, that statement would be true. Instead, the section codifies the Presidents view as if it had always existed, authorizing detention of persons regardless of citizenship or where they are arrested. It then disingenuously says the bill doesnt change that view.
In fact, the Senate expressly rejected a provision that would have prevented the indefinite detention of American citizens. Sen. Feinstein offered another amendment to sec. 1021 that stated the section does not include the authority to detain a citizen of the United States without trial until the end of hostilities. That amendment was rejected 45-55. Sen. Feinsteins other amendment, which does nothing to protect U.S. citizens, passed 99-1.
Our Constitution does not permit the federal government to detain American citizens indefinitely without charge or trial. I strongly believe in protecting the countrys security and equipping our Armed Forces with the tools they need to defeat our enemies. But the American people cannot support measures that, in the name of security, violate our constitutional rights.
The NDAAs backers succeeded in part because of the bills length and complexity. And I concede that this issue takes time to understand. Over the next few months, I hope to join others who value our countrys constitutional rights to block the NDAAs dangerous detention provision. Once the American public sees for itself whats included in the NDAA, Im confident they will demand we do so.
LOL back at you, Freeper. They've been watching this website a whole lot longer, and you're already on their list.
ILS21R is already on their list?..ohhhh boy...lol
All they have to do is check every airport that has a 21R ILS control and they have your mother’s maiden name LOL!
SO that posters here can have the opportunity to see some of the provisions of the bill, then here, the exact sections, d and e, state that :
CONSTRUCTION.Nothing in this section is intended to limit or expand the authority of the President or the scope of the Authorization for Use of Military Force.
(e) AUTHORITIES.Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.
And this is what i was getting at before. I am not at all saying that it isnt problematic and the new provisions as a whole could not be abused by any adminsitration-Obama’s or a succeeding one. And there are a lot of things about the bill not to like. But clearly you can see that US citizens are subject to the same laws they have always been subject to. The previous sets of laws passed by Congress, not to mention Supreme Court rulings in cases where the govt tried to detain US citizens without trial and lost, can all be easily contrued to determine that current law explicitely forbids detaining of US citizens as unconstitutional. And existing law means, or at least can easily be interpreted to mean, laws that were in the books before NDAA was passed, meaning they do not refer to the presidents views as expressed in the NDAA 2012 bill itself. And so if a a large number of US citizens were detained, all of them would be able to take their cases to Court on the basis that existing law delcares it unconsitutional, and this bill does nothing to change that.
Also, “the section codifies the Presidents view as if it had always existed” does not make a lot of sense either. Does that mean that the president can say that he always viewed it possibly to detain US citizens indefinitely without a trail or due process and then claim that view always existed ? If so, that would clearly be hotly contested, as any halfway decent lawyer could argue that the president’s view and existing laws are not the same thing. The president could claim that the new view is that he could detain all US citizens he wants too, and that he always could, but it would still be contested as directly conflicting with existing laws, as in laws previously passed by Congress and previous rulings by SCOTUS.
Again, it is not to say that an administration wouldnt try to abuse this and interpret it how they want to. But we have had endless laws with vauge, ambiguous language that can be, and have been, interpreted problematically. The central point is that this bill clearly is not a means to give the adminsitration power to direct the military to snatch citizens and detain them at will.
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