Posted on 04/06/2007 4:49:53 AM PDT by Brilliant
...Nancy Pelosi may well have committed a felony in traveling to Damascus this week, against the wishes of the president, to communicate on foreign-policy issues with Syrian President Bashar Assad...
The "Logan Act" makes it a felony and provides for a prison sentence of up to three years for any American, "without authority of the United States," to communicate with a foreign government in an effort to influence that government's behavior on any "disputes or controversies with the United States."...
President John Adams requested the statute after a Pennsylvania pacifist ...traveled to France in 1798 to assure the French government that the American people favored peace... Rep. Roger Griswold...explained that the object was... "to punish a crime which goes to the destruction of the executive power..."
Rep. Isaac Parker of Massachusetts explained, "the people of the United States have given to the executive department the power to negotiate with foreign governments, and to carry on all foreign relations, and that it is therefore an usurpation of that power for an individual to undertake to correspond with any foreign power on any dispute..."
Griswold and Parker were Federalists who believed in strong executive power. But consider this statement by Albert Gallatin, the future Secretary of the Treasury under ...Jefferson, who was wary of centralized government: "it would be extremely improper for a member of this House to enter into any correspondence with the French Republic..." Indeed, the offense is greater when the usurpation of the president's constitutional authority is done by a member of the legislature -- all the more so by a Speaker of the House -- because it violates not just statutory law but constitutes a usurpation of the powers of a separate branch and a breach of the oath of office Ms. Pelosi took to support the Constitution...
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Oh yes. I expect the Bush administration to arrest Pelosi (eyes rolling).
This law will of course be enforced with great fervor:)
Excellent piece..thanks for posting.
Don’t all U.S. citizens have standing to bring charges?
Jim “Ft. Worthless” Wright (D-TX) should have been arrested by Pres. Reagan for traipsing to Nicaragua to boost Little Danny Ortega’s insurgency back in the ‘80s, and that would have given pause to current Dems who undercut the powers of the Executive Branch. But no, the Logan Act is just one of those leftover laws that won’t be enforced...unless some Republican goes abroad and opens his mouth during Hillary’s administration. To the gallows with him then.
Sadly, they do not. The USSC decided years ago in a compilation of tax challenge cases, brought by private citizens, that the private citizen can't do zip about enforcing or challenging laws of the land (except for exercising his/her right to vote.)
Alright. Does anyone other than the Administration, then, have standing to bring suit against Madam Speaker and any others involved?
No - this is wonderful. The demonrats are complaining about Bush breaking a law with his “volunteer” recess appointment. If they press that issue, he should immediately say “fine - here’s the law YOU broke. Wanna fight?”
The only way Bush is going to get any respect is if he grows a new pair of balls (the old pair seems to have fallen off).
Oh, and, while we are at it, let’s have Jimmy Carter arrested.
(”The law hath not been dead, though it hath slept”)
LOGAN ACT :
§ 953. Private correspondence with foreign governments Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both. This section shall not abridge the right of a citizen to apply, himself or his agent, to any foreign government or the agents thereof for redress of any injury which he may have sustained from such government or any of its agents or subjects.
The theory of voting the #$%%^& out does not work. They seem to be all the same. Just profession campaigners that have learned to speak out of both sides of their mouth. I am sick of it!!!!
Yes I can see them prosecuting her, not, they let Sandy Burger go.
But this is a great palce to draw the line and prosecute her.
“Citizen’s arrest! Citizen’s arrest!”
BTW, I know this is changing the subject, but is purjury against the law???
There is no respect for the Constitution anymore. It is just a piece of paper written by a bunch of dead people, we have evolved past it relevancy. I doubt that the majority of our elected officials have ever even read the Constitution. We are now governed by polls, special interest groups and globalism. Those who serve in goverment are an elite protected class of people, similar the the aristocrats in England. Our President refuses to protect our sovereignty, even though, he takes an oath to do so. It’s disgusting!! I can’t even put into words the anger and sadness I feel for what my children will have to endure.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20070406/cm_usatoday/pelosistepsoutofbounds
Opinion
Pelosi steps out of bounds 2 hours, 15 minutes ago
Democrats in Congress have been busy flexing their foreign policy muscles almost from the moment they took power in January, for the most part responsibly. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (news, bio, voting record) crossed a line this week by visiting Syria, where she met with President Bashar Assad. She violated a long-held understanding that the United States should speak with one official voice abroad - even if the country is deeply divided on foreign policy back home.
Like it or not (and we do not), President Bush’s policy has been to refuse to negotiate with Syria until it changes its behavior. That behavior is malignant. Syria has long meddled destructively in neighboring Lebanon and is widely seen as the bloody hand behind the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. Syria has aligned itself with Iran and supports the violently anti- Israel groups Hezbollah and Hamas. It foments violence in Iraq by allowing suicide bombers and jihadists to cross the Syria-Iraq border.
Pelosi surely knew that as speaker - third in the succession line to the presidency - her high-profile presence in Damascus would be read as a contradiction of Bush’s no-talkpolicy. No matter that she claimed to have stuck closely to administration positions in her conversations with Assad, smiling photos of Pelosi and the Syrian president convey the unspoken message that while the U.S. president is unwilling to talk with Syria, another wing of the government is. Assad made good use of the moment.
-snip-
It would be political suicide to go after anyone for what Nancy has done. Maybe when Jessie Jackson first did this some years ago, if he had been prosecuted and convicted, this could be prevented today, but it would have been politically risky even back then. (I don't recall the details of this; can anyone fill in them in?)
The bottom line is that there is not a single candidate for President that has even a slight chance to make it to the White House that would dare to do anything about this.
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