Posted on 05/15/2019 8:56:25 AM PDT by Will not Live for another Man
Fellow Freepers,
As you all, collectively, are the smartest folks I could bring this to, I bring you this vanity...
Last night, my eighth grade son informed me his history teacher (yes public school, yes I know, the only saving grace is next year he will be in a trade school) told the class that the president could suspend the Constitution in a national emergency.
I dutifully told him that was hogwash, pulled out our Constitution and went through the president's Article II rights and duties. Clearly, suspending the Constitution is NOT one of them.
I composed a nice email to the teacher explaining my son apparently didn't understand the lesson and asking him to correct my son's impression.
The teacher just wrote back with some cockamamie link that claims the president does indeed have that power.
Am I or is the teacher incorrect?
I believe that one would be wrong.
The President can arguably suspend habeas corpus, but there is no reasonable interpretation of the Constitution that would allow the President to suspend the entire Constitution.
Article 1, Section 9 states, “The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”
Lincoln suspended Habeas during the Civil War, and his actions were deemed to be unconstitutional in Ex parte Milligan, 71 US 2 (1866). The Court held what Lincoln did was unconstitutional, but the Court did also mention cases where martial law might need to be imposed:
“If, in foreign invasion or civil war, the courts are actually closed, and it is impossible to administer criminal justice according to law, then, on the theatre of active military operations, where war really prevails, there is a necessity to furnish a substitute for the civil authority, thus overthrown, to preserve the safety of the army and society; and as no power is left but the military, it is allowed to govern by martial rule until the laws can have their free course. As necessity creates the rule, so it limits its duration; for, if this government is continued after the courts are reinstated, it is a gross usurpation of power. Martial rule can never exist where the courts are open, and in the proper and unobstructed exercise of their jurisdiction. It is also confined to the locality of actual war.”
Here is a good link for you:
How?
WWI, Wilson took over the railroads.
Isn’t that what martial law is?
And was killed for it.
From what I understand only under a declared National Emergency(War)or Martial Law.
President Lincoln did this with the State of Maryland(which I live in)as he suspend all Elected Official, put the Port of Baltimore under Military Control along with Annapolis. The President suspended Habeas Corpus. This move was to prevent the State of Maryland from joining the Confederacy in 1862.
FDR also suspended on a limited basic Habeas Corpus for Japanese Americans (Citizenship), which lead to their interment in camps following Pearl Harbor.
Hope this helps.
Habeas corpus is pretty much not an issue in the courts. They just laugh at it if you try to invoke it. At least in Kalifornia, I saw some poor guy try it a few years ago and the judge got really annoyed.
Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus in the first year of the Civil War, responding to riots and local militia actions in the border states by allowing the indefinite detention of "disloyal persons" without trial. Habeas corpus, which literally means "you have the body," is a constitutional mandate requiring the government to give prisoners access to the courts.
Lincoln ignored a Supreme Court justice's decision overturning his order, and over the next few years, the Great Emancipator, in one of the war's starkest ironies, allowed these new restrictions, which also imposed martial law in some volatile border areas and curbed freedom of speech and the press, to expand throughout the Northern states.
As the war drew to a close, though, some historians believe Lincoln may have begun to recognize the dangers of his own unprecedented expansion of presidential war powers. More than 13,000 civilians were arrested under martial law during the war throughout the Union. But it was in Missouri, in particular, nearly a thousand miles from the nation's capital and far beyond the federal government's day-to-day reach, that Lincoln was confronted with the most dramatic example of his internal security measures' unintended consequences.
In the months before he was assassinated, Lincoln found, to his surprise, that he was unable to convince Missouri's Republican leaders—who had grown accustomed to their newfound powers—to put an end to martial law in the state. The lesson he learned, historians say, may have been a simple one: "It is much easier," says Eric Foner, a professor of history at Columbia University, "to put these restrictions in place than it is to stop them."
When the war started, there was little doubt in Lincoln's mind that his suspension of civil liberties was both necessary and constitutional. His political opponents may have disagreed, but facing a full-fledged insurrection in the South and with the loyalty of Maryland, the state between Washington, D.C., and the rest of the Union, wavering, Lincoln had grounds to worry that the nation's capital was in real danger.
Well, of course, he can suspend the Constitution if the military supports the move 100%! ;-)
Yes. See Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln, the Illinois Butcher™.
Any part he didn't like. He suspended some pretty important parts, like "Freedom of Speech", "Due Process", and "Habeas Corpus".
He just did what he wanted because he recognized no constraints on his power.
And how is it the "correct and moral" thing to do under the circumstances? Killed a lot of people, and created a lot of suffering, and none of it should have happened.
bttt
No, of course not.
It is stupid to even bring it up as a notion.
The War of Northern Agression (aka Civil War) set the standard.
Lincoln suspended the Writ of Habeas Corpus and had hundreds or thousands of people jailed without charge or trial. He also nationalized the telegraph and put it under military control, banned newspapers, and had editors arrested.
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