Garbage. The Constitution ALWAYS applies. Your tortured rendering of Milligan is the real fault. It is also solid testament to the fact that you cannot so much as quote a simple and straight forward court ruling without completely bastardizing its meaning for the lone purpose of obfuscating its undesired implications upon your Stalinist ideology and your false god.
"It will be borne in mind that this is not a question of the power to proclaim martial law when war exists in a community and the courts and civil authorities are overthrown. Nor is it a question what rule a military commander, at the head of his army, can impose on states in rebellion to cripple their resources and quell the insurrection."
What do you think they meant when they made these exceptions?
I must admit, you neo-reb are an endless source of entertainment. Especially the self-righteous use of the Millgan decision to prove some hypercritical point you attempt to make. But it just doesn't wash. It didn't wash in the 1860's either.
Professor Thomas D. Morris in his article, "The Constitution: A Law for Rulers in War and Peace?" documents the post-case clarifications by Justice David Davis to the wrong-headed interpretations then being made by southern whites and other unreconstructed losers. Morris writes:
"But there was still more at stake in Milligan than a libertarian protection of dissent during war. The case must be seen within the context of Reconstruction as much as that of Civil War. Throughout the South during 1865 and 1866 federal authorities used the military to prevent a resurgence of power by conservative southern white and to protect blacks and their allies from violence and oppression. Throughout the South, trials were held by military commissions, or in military provost courts, or in courts of the Freedmen's Bureau, an agency largely run by military personnel. What was the relationship between the Milligan opinion and the use of the military in the South? President Andrew Johnson argued that the opinion prohibited the use of military courts. Justice Davis, in an extensive letter, tried to explain his view of the relationship. There was none, he wrote. The was "not a word said in the opinion about reconstruction & the power is conceded in insurrectionary states." He was particularly stung by charges in Republican newspapers that Milligan was a second Dred Scott opinion in that it stripped the power to protect blacks and carry out an effective reconstruction policy. Dred Scott, Davis retorted, "was in the interest of Slavery, & the Milligan opinion in the interest of liberty." But he immediately gave away the game when he added in the next sentence: "I did not suppose the Republican party would endorse such trials after the war is over. Yet they do it."
The points made by Prof. Morris and by Justice Davis are very clear. Milligan was not intended to apply to "insurrectionary states." It was not intended to interfere with military rule there in times of war.
As Morris had noted earlier in his article:
"Despite these profound affirmations of civil liberties [i.e. "the Constitution ... is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and peace"], however, there was something slightly disingenuous about Davis's opinion. He opened it with an admission that during the 'wicked Rebellion' the temper of the country precluded a calmness vital to judicial resolution. Once the war ended and the public safety was secured, he maintained, the issues could be discussed and resolved. This was nearly an admission that during the war itself, 'adequacy' constitutionalism necessarily prevailed."