In the law according to GOPcapitalist, perhaps. The rest of us have to limp along with the legal definition of ex post facto, which is what I said earlier.
No. In the law according to the U.S. Constitution.
The rest of us have to limp along with the legal definition of ex post facto, which is what I said earlier.
That definition is not from the Constitution, nor is it much of a legal definition. Literally, the term signifies a law which is done "after the fact."
Commonly this is applied to a situation of criminalizing an act that somebody you don't like has already committed then retroactively arresting him for it. For example, if Congress didn't like Walt, decided to pass a law banning cut n' pastes off of AOL moderated newsgroups, and then imprisoned Walt on a cut n' paste of his from last year, it would be an ex post facto law.
It would be every bit as "after the fact" if they passed a law decriminalizing something previous to get a friend off the hook. Suppose for this example that the GOP congress passed a non-ex post facto cut n' paste ban and Walt got arrested and sentenced. Now suppose that the Democrats won control of Congress next year and decided that they were going to help out their old buddy Walt as a thank you for all of his years of devotion and service to their party, so they retroactively pass a law that legalizes Walt's cut n' pastes after the fact. It too would be ex post facto, and therefore unconstitutional.
There is method behind this approach, non-seq. It is there to prevent the possibility that, say, a Congressman's brother was in jail for murder, thus inciting his powerful sibling to pass a law legislating him out of jail.