Posted on 12/01/2011 6:19:22 AM PST by Kaslin
Can the president use the military to arrest anyone he wants, keep that person away from a judge and jury, and lock him up for as long as he wants? In the Senate's dark and terrifying vision of the Constitution, he can.
Congress is supposed to work in public. That requirement is in the Constitution. It is there because the folks who wrote the Constitution had suffered long and hard under the British Privy Council, a secret group that advised the king and ran his government. We know from the now-defunct supercommittee, and other times when Congress has locked its doors, that government loves secrecy and hates transparency. Transparency forces the government to answer to us. Secrecy lets it steal our liberty and our property behind our backs.
Last week, while our minds were on family and turkey and football, the Senate Armed Services Committee decided to meet in secret. So, behind closed doors, it drafted an amendment to a bill appropriating money for the Pentagon. The amendment would permit the president to use the military for law enforcement purposes in the United States. This, of course, would present a radical departure from any use to which the military has been put in the memory of any Americans now living.
The last time the federal government regularly used the military for domestic law enforcement was at the end of Reconstruction in the South, in 1876. In fact, the deal to end Reconstruction resulted in the enactment of federal laws forbidding the domestic use of American military for law enforcement purposes. This has been our law, our custom and our set of values to which every president has adhered for 135 years.
It is not for directing traffic that this legislation would authorize the president to use the military. Essentially, this legislation would enable the president to divert from the criminal justice system, and thus to divert from the protections of the Constitution, any person he pleases. And that person, under this terrifying bill, would have no recourse to a judge to require the president either to file charges against him or to set him free.
Can you imagine an America in which you could lose all liberty -- from the presumption of innocence to the right to counsel to fairness from the government to a jury trial -- simply because the president says you are dangerous?
Nothing terrified or animated the Founders more than that. The Founders, who wrote the Constitution, had just won a war against a king who had less power than this legislation will give to the president. But to protect their freedoms, they wrote in the Constitution the now iconic guarantee of due process. The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution says, "No person shall be ... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." Note, the Founders used the word "person." Thus, the requirement of due process must be accorded to all human beings held by the government -- not just Americans, not just nice people, but all persons. When Lincoln tried to deny this during the Civil War, the Supreme Court rejected him and held that the Constitution guarantees its protections to everyone that the government restrains, no matter the crime, no matter the charge, no matter the evidence, no matter the danger.
If this legislation becomes law, it will be dangerous for anyone to be right when the government is wrong. It will be dangerous for all of us. Just consider what any president could get away with. Who would he make disappear first? Might it be his political opponents? Might it be you?
Delta Force was present. Because of that, I have no respect for DF at all.
It was the mushy middle that agreed to sign on to the massive expansion of national power in exchange for a bill of rights. Any antifederalist worth his salt opposed the Constitution tooth and nail.
The original purpose of Congress was to ensure their enforcement...
You must be the FR hermit.
Military garb, military weapons, military tactics. If someone opens up on you (unarmed) with a 7.62 FMJ M-16 does it really matter if they are Army or National Guard? If it walks like a duck......
I don’t dispute that but the fact is that The Bill of Rights protected the states and the individuals. That is why every elected person must swear to support and defend the Constitution. The problem has been erosion. It is time to shore it up. We the People need to build a retaining wall and maintain it.
Yeah, you’re right. Why let a little truth enter the discussion.
I was challenging the veracity of the judge’s statement. You challenged the veracity of mine. Now you say I don’t know about totalitarianism. Revisionist history is a tool of the despot and ignorance is its workshop....I leave you to wallow in it.
If you followed this thread after your #19 you’ll see my wisecrack wasn’t far off the mark.
Oh please. 911 was a result of govt incompetence, not the absence of more police state laws and bs.
So says you. I disagree.
The government incompetence that lead to 9/11 was written into the laws and lack thereof. The intentional wall setup by democrats (and willing republican accomplishes) that restricted the sharing of intelligence, laws that restricted investigations based upon phony civil rights concerns and a host of other Code Pink like actions taken by many leftists in government intended to help weaken the United States National Security.
You may want to blame the hard-working men and women of our intelligence community but the blame doesn’t lie there but instead lies at the hands of the legislators and the left-wing terrorist civil rights crowd like the Code Pink democrats and the Code Pink libertarians like Ron Paul and Judge Napolitano.
In practice it's been a mixed bag.
Really? You mean like the FBI not following up on the flight school owner warning them and giving info on the students?
You mean like the visa applications that were insanely flawed that should NEVER have been approved?
It was not that the FBI simply did not follow up but that provisions in the law (the famous Wall) prevented certain types of follow up from happening. You had an environment created by our legislators of demonizing law enforcement based upon bogus civil rights claims.
This bogus civil rights excuse for weakening United States National Security efforts is the same mentality that is being promoted in this thread.
‘oh the travesty of wanting to detain a terrorist without a trial’ has Code Pink leftists and Code Pink libertarians crying foul. They are like the ‘terrorist civil rights’ movement and they are the cause of 9/11 as well.
Nonsense. The fbi never did its job due to incompetence not lack of laws.
There’s no fix for this law. It’s just plain a stupid totalitarian law that has no useful purpose, hell they aren’t even trying to give it a proper smoke screen like the wars on terror or drugs. They’re just making a grab for power. The “fix” is to shoot every no good SOB that voted for it, short of that I suppose we could try to vote them out, better be careful though, they might arrest their opponents.
The GAO says they (US Army and National Guard) were there and they spent at least a million dollars on the raid.
http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/bl090599.htm
It is my belief that the mockup built and used to train the ATF for the raid was built on Fort Hood property.
The infamous US News? picture of the crew “cleaning” the site after it was partially bull-dozed, using sifter-screens, looks like military to me. The one long, lanky dude in fatigues on the roof above the hole in the pantry roof looks suspiciously like Weasly Clark to me.
The FBI agent in charge of the final days was the same guy convicted of destroying evidence at the Randy Weaver siege site.
I wish it was not so, but our government has a long record of attacking citizens, dating back to the thirties and beyond! If they have ever been punished I sure haven’t heard of it!!
You are 100% wrong.
It was due to bad laws and a lack of the proper laws that lead to 9/11.
There are instances every single day of someone in the FBI or other areas of law enforcement not doing their job well but with the proper laws, whereas agencies work together, acts of terrorism are still stopped due to the proper legal framework that allows for due diligence in recognizing and stopping acts of terrorism.
The law doesn’t even apply to American citizens (from what I have heard) and it is just a bunch of tin-foil hat BS from the Paultard crowd that claims this is some great threat to everyone. It is no different than the lies and BS these Code Pinko losers spouted about the Patriot Act, the Iraq war, Gitmo, etc…
If you want to follow a bunch of Code Pink type losers who defended the terrorist supporting dictator, Saddam Hussein then let’s hear it. I personally am tired of the anti-American National Defense crowd that is against all and everything that we try to do to prevent further attacks here at home.
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