In other words, don't worry about the Constitution, trust the government.
Sigh.
The important paragraph is 1701, which grants to the President extraordinary powers in the event of a "National Emergency". Every President in my living memory has issued one or more decrees declaring this or that "National Emergency"
Read the chapter, and the prior chapter. Congress essentially handed the president a blank check, if he chooses to cash it
“Stroke of the pen. Law of the land. Kinda cool.”
I know the Constitutional argument, and I respect it immensely. I just also know this kind of thing seems to have been done in the past: Lincoln in the Civil War suspended Habeas Corpus, and FDR in WW2 engaged in a lot of, well, nefarious activities.
The loss of liberties has always been temporary...and I see no reason to think it won't be the same this time around.
If anyone can show me a reason to disbelieve my trust in the system this time, I will listen and consider their point of view.
I really think this war with Islamofacism is going to determine how (or if) my kid grows up in a world without daily beheadings in the local soccer fields...and we need to be going "all out" against these murderous bastards as best we can.
One might even argue Bush can say he is defending the United States against "all enemies, foreign and domestic" with this EO.
Does this mean Pelosi and Reid’s property will get confiscated?
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
The Iraq War resolutions, the WOT Acts and the financial acts passed against Muslim terrorism are very broadly written.
To actually seize the assets etc, the Departments need procedures. Those procedures are always outline in Executive Orders for these types of broad acts where the Executive is OBLIGATED to carry out the intent of the Legislative Branch, on-the-fly against changing circumstances.
The President with the EO is merely broadening other orders to hit (IMHO) those undermining the new government, where before it was only set up against the Muslim terror groups.
This whole thread is a tempest in a teapot. These EOs in the Clinton era were just as scary in the raw wording.
This guy is WAY out of line on this.
At first- I thought this was a joke.
I’m no lawyer- but this seems an extreme furtherance of...something that I don’t “get”. What is he REALLY doing here? And is it constitutional?
Scary. A lot of Saudi money could be impounded. Buy a horse before the rush, and take good care of. It may be a while before we get the cajones to seize their oil fields...
“The question is, who decides who is helping terrorists?”
“Alex, I’ll take Bananna Republics for $500, please”
I just now saw this myself. I’m by no means a legal person. Basically, what in the hell does all of this mean?
On its face it appears to be some type of power grab.
I’m all for seizing the assets of people who aid terrorists....
But to me, this appears to be a blatant transgression of the protections provided by the fifth amendment.
This, IMO, borders on impeachable offense.
Rulers prefer more power to less, but in a liberal democracy the rulers are constrained by institutions that sustain private rights.1 Specifically, private property rights place the power of resource allocation in the hands of private citizens, thereby limiting the capacity of governmental officials to shape the economy. Governmental officials have interests of their own, which are not necessarily representative of or even in harmony with the interests of people outside government. Therefore, the rulers and the ruled normally struggle in various ways to determine who will control the use of resources. The greater the scope of private property rights, the more limited is the capacity of the rulers to achieve the ends they prefer at the expense of those preferred by the citizenry.
For several reasons, rights taken over by governmental officials during an emergency are unlikely to revert fully to their previous holders when normal times return.
http://www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=124
One more excerpt:
After vacillating during 1934–36, sometimes sustaining and sometimes striking down the government’s unprecedented derogations from private property rights, the Court caved in completely in 1937. Since then it has maintained that virtually any state or federal governmental interference with private property rights is constitutional. Only a law that is manifestly arbitrary and lacking any imaginable relation to a public purpose will be disallowed. In a bloodless revolution, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned constitutional protections of private property rights that had existed for 150 years.3