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To: WhiskeyPapa
The Constitution nowhere says what the president may or may not do in regards to Habeas Corpus.

Nowhere does it even remotely extend the right to suspend it to him. Therefore it is unreasonable to assume he has it. Try again.

1,325 posted on 12/02/2002 5:49:18 PM PST by GOPcapitalist
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To: GOPcapitalist
The Constitution nowhere says what the president may or may not do in regards to Habeas Corpus.

Nowhere does it even remotely extend the right to suspend it to him.

As you know, Chief Justice Rehnquist disagrees with you.

Why would you marginlaize yourself my taking such unreasonable positions?

Walt

1,326 posted on 12/03/2002 2:49:31 AM PST by WhiskeyPapa
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To: GOPcapitalist
Here's something a bit more reasonable that your excuse filled screed:

"In these early months of the Civil War, the Lincoln administration overcame its fears of public reaction to restrictions on civil liberties, instituted a novel internal security system, and came to believe that it worked. Not every historian today would credit it with saving Maryland for the Union, but that conclusion became almost a truism in Lincoln's day. Nathaniel Banks, who commanded the Department of Annapolis in 1861, was a poor general but an astute politician, and he thought the system worked. Indeed, Maryland provided Banks with a model for reconstruction in Louisiana later:

The secession leaders—the enemies of the people—were replaced and loyal men assigned to... their duties. This made Maryland a loyal State.... What happened there will occur in North Carolina, in South Carolina, in Georgia, in Alabama and Mississippi. If... those States shall be controlled by men that are loyal... we shall then have loyal populations and loyal governments.

The success of the Maryland policy became a political byword and was celebrated, beyond the borders of Maryland, throughout the war. Thus in 1863, a Loyal Publication Society pamphlet on the War Power of the President explained the necessity of military arrests rather than reliance on the courts by pointing to that familiar example:

When the traitors of the loyal state of Maryland were concocting their grand scheme to hurl the organized power of that state against the government, probably not a handful of them was known to be guilty of any act for which he could ever have been arrested by civil process. And whatever their offenses against the laws might have been, and whatever the fidelity of the courts in that jurisdiction, the process of civil law would have been far too slow to prevent the consummation of the gigantic treason which would have added another state to the rebellion.... Courts could not have suppressed this unholy work, but the summary imprisonment of those few men saved the state of Maryland to the Union cause.

Republicans would later enjoy substantial bipartisan agreement on the necessity of the early arrests in Maryland.
William K. Seward thought they worked, too. When an old associate of Seward came to Washington to plead for the release of a political prisoner from Kentucky held in Fort Lafayette, the secretary of state readily admitted that no charges were on file against the prisoner. When asked whether he intended to keep citizens imprisoned against whom no charge had been made, Seward apparently answered: "I don't care a d—n whether they are guilty or Innocent. I saved Maryland by similar arrests, and so I mean to hold Kentucky."

The earliest days of the Lincoln administration taught the president and his cabinet lessons they never forgot. In fact, these days left fiercely indelible marks on them. This was especially true of Seward. In 1864, when the artist Francis B. Carpenter unveiled his huge historical canvas commemorating the first reading of the Emancipation Proclamation to the cabinet, the secretary of state scoffed at It. He told the artist, at a party given at Gideon Welles's residence, that he had been wrong to choose emancipation as "the great feature of the Administration."

Seward told him [Welles recalled] to go back to the firing on Sumter, or to a much more exciting one than even that, the Sunday following the Baltimore massacre, when the Cabinet assembled or gathered in the Navy Department and, with the vast responsibility that was thrown upon them, met the emergency and its awful consequences, put in force the war power of the government, and issued papers and did acts that might have brought them all to the scaffold.

The first suspension of the writ of habeas corpus occurred the very week after that fateful Sunday cabinet meeting. Gideon Welles, the secretary of the navy, did not care for Seward, but he remembered those days just as the secretary of state did:

Few, comparatively, know or can appreciate the actual condition of things and state of feeling of the members of the Administration In those days. Nearly sixty years of peace had unfitted us for any war, but the most terrible of all wars, a civil one, was upon us, and it had to be met. Congress had adjourned without making any provision for the storm, though aware that it was at hand and soon to burst upon the country. A new administration, scarely acquainted with each other, and differing essentially in the past, was compelled to act, promptly and decisively.

And act they did."

-- "The Fate of Liberty; Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties" p. 31 by Mark Neeley

People today who love the United States will pretty much agree with Neeley -- and Lincoln.

Walt


1,331 posted on 12/03/2002 5:49:03 AM PST by WhiskeyPapa
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To: GOPcapitalist
The Constitution nowhere says what the president may or may not do in regards to Habeas Corpus.

Nowhere does it even remotely extend the right to suspend it to him. Therefore it is unreasonable to assume he has it. Try again.

The Court ruled in the Prize Cases that the executive power of the government rests upon the president. The Constitution requires that every state have a republican government. The Militia Act requires that United States law operate in all the states.

Chief Justice Marshall ruled in McCullough:

"The subject is the execution of those great powers on which the welfare of a nation essentially depends. It must have been the intention of those who gave these powers, to insure, as far as human prudence could insure, their beneficial execution. This could not be done by confining their choice of means to such narrow limits as not to leave it in the power of Congress to adopt any which might be approprate, and which were conducive to the end...to have prescribed the means by which the government, should, in all future times, execute its powers, would have been to change, entirely, the character of the instrument, and give it the properties of a legal code...To have declared, that the best means shal not be used, but those alone, without which the power given would be nugatory...if we apply this principle of construction to any of the powers of the government, we shall find it so pernicious in its operation that we shall be compelled to discard it..."

From McCullough v. Maryland, quoted in "American Constittutional Law"

A.T. Mason, et al. ed. 1983 p. 165.

President Lincoln had all the power and precedent he needed to suspend the Writ.

To say that it is nowhere "even remotely" extant, is simply partisanship -- and its partisanship that discredits almost everything you say. Your statements are mostly your opinion. Mine are well grounded in the words of the people who actually participated in these events.

Walt

1,336 posted on 12/03/2002 6:33:33 AM PST by WhiskeyPapa
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