Posted on 06/04/2007 12:37:00 PM PDT by jrooney
Jefferson's Indictment is being shown live now on Fox News!
Despite the protestations of the French revolutionaries to the contrary, they cared so little for Protestants that the very heart of the Huguenot power base in Saumer remains essentialy devoid of them.
You always have to keep in mind who the victims of these hideous crimes are ~ frequently they are people the majority simply doesn't care for.
France continues to have problems with Protestants.
Precisely because pure democracy is just another form of tyranny.
It's been much more often the case that tyranny has come from tyrants!
By Aristotle's definition, a tyranny is a entity that subsumes all the power in the state unto itself and exercises such power in its own interests.
A parliament that possesses power over the executive and the judiciary is, in effect, a legislature and an executive and a judiciary in one.
Tyranny occurs when there is only one entity with the power to simultaneously make, enforce and interpret laws.
And whenever representative bodies are the most powerful entity in the state they become tyrannies quite quickly - precisely because they can claim popular support as elected representatives.
Again, you are conflating Congress with individual members of Congress. Congress has absolute immunity from the Executive and the Judiciary because, as it turns out, they have the legal weapons to dispose of the persons representing the two other branches.
An individual member of Congress shares in that immunity until expelled by either House. You'll notice that in France they extend an even grander sort of immunity to the President. They won't be able to prosecute Chirac until later this month. Our President, on the other hand, has an unlimited power to pardon ~ presumably Bill Clinton signed one to use "just in case" just in case the he got "convicted" in the Senate in his impeachment trial. He'd need that done before he was kicked out!
Debate fails when you don't respond to the words on the table.
No, the people of the Vendee were rural Roman Catholics.
There was once a sizable population of Protestants in the Vendee, but they were driven from the area in the persecution that followed the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes almost a century before the French Revolution.
There were two events that precipitated antirevolutionary violence in the Vendee: the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which forced the clergy to renounce the Pope or be forced underground, and the Conscription decrees.
The Vendee was known for having the highest percentage of Catholic priests who chose prison or death over renouncing the Pope.
Just as the forces of the Revolution wore tricolor cockades to identify themselves, thousands of peasant irregulars in the Vendee wore badges of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and of the Immaculate heart of Mary.
The small community of French Protestants were actually immune from most of the religious laws enacted by the Constituent Assembly, and they were overrepresented in the CA in proportion to their numbers. However, they also disproportionately suffered from increasing inflation and taxation as they were one of the most urban and enterprising segments of the population.
Regarding the Vondee peasantry, you can listen to the French government’s propaganda for the last 217 years or take a look at the facts. Before the peasants lost their heads (actually, guy named Carrier loaded them onto barges, hauled them out into the river, then sank the barges ~ rather like the German gas chamber/oven trick ~ those crazy guys and gals in Europe are always up to something eh) there were still Protestants in the region ~ rather repressed, but present. After they killed everybody there were no more Protestants.
And they certainly did leave en masse after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
There is no evidence that a single Protestant was on board the barges that Carrier sunk.
What we do know is that among the prisoners that Carrier murdered were a large number of prisoners of war taken from the forces of Henri de la Rochejaquelein, who was the commander of the largest army in the Vendee resistance movement.
The name of that force?
The Royal And Catholic Armies Of France.
After the recission of the Edict of Nantes, no one in his right mind would stay in france and let anyone know he was a Protestant. Still, the neighbors knew and turned 'em in to the committees of public safety and agents from Paris.
BTW, this doesn’t mean that France’s central government hadn’t changed some time before the Revolution. There are Jews named among the members of the White Coats who fought against the British invaders in Canada for example. At that time they would most likely have been the only Jews in any army in the world.
Nothing in the historical record squares with this claim.
To reiterate:
(1) The Vendee revolt was a revolt of Roman Catholics against an officially atheist government which had publicly desecrated the Cathedral of Notre Dame as part of a campaign of anti-Catholic propaganda. This same government persecuted the Catholic clergy by forcing them to renounce their ecclesiastical loyalty to the Pope. As a result the clergy who refused to betray the Pope were jailed, killed, or driven underground. The Committee Of Public Safety publicly guillotined 16 Carmelite nuns for their prioress' refusal to swear an oath disowning the Pope.
(2) The Vendee resistance coalesced into an army which called itself the Royal And Catholic Army Of France. The rank and file of this army were not uniformed but identified themselves with specifically Catholic symbols - badges representing the Two Hearts, a Catholic devotion which Calvinists would have found repugnant.
(3) Carrier was a general appointed by The Committee Of Public Safety who was an outspoken anti-clerical and he was an early member of the Jacobin Club - the most anti-Catholic faction in the Constituent Assembly.
(4) Not only was the revolutionary regime aggressively anti-Catholic, it was pro-Protestant.
The discriminatory laws that were enacted against Protestants following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes were themselves revoked by the revolutionary law of December 15, 1790 inviting the descendants of all Huguenots who had been driven from the country following the Revocation to return, and to have their citizenship reinstated. Carrier's Jacobin Club was the group in the Constituent Assembly which authored this law and which was instrumental in its passage.
(5) Very few Huguenots bothered to return, since they were very prosperous in England, Germany and Canada and return to France may have restored their rights on the one hand, but it would have subjected them and their children to the Conscription Acts that drafted citizens into the army.
The only Huguenots who did return were the ones who were fervent supporters of the Constituent Assembly.
(6) The original Protestant community of the Vendee were the Calvinist congregations of the port city of La Rochelle. They numbered about 20,000-25,000 before the Revocation and had strong ties to Huguenots in England and the New World, since all the prominent families in the community were involved in shipping.
There had been even more of them before, but many had been driven out during the siege of La Rochelle, when Cardinal Richelieu brutally repressed a Protestant uprising in the area led by the Duc de Rohan in the 1620s.
As a result the Huguenots of the Vendee had many relatives who had already settled in England and even in the New World in the 1630s, and when the Revocation happened it was very easy for them to leave because there were immigrant communities overseas to welcome them.
Something like half the Protestant population of the Vendee was living in Shoreditch within months after the Revocation. Another large crew of fleeing Vendee Protestants from la Rochelle founded the beautiful town of New Rochelle on the Hudson river in New York.
Ultimately, I believe you are confusing the Roman Catholic uprising in the Vendee of the 1790s with the Huguenot uprising in the Vendee of the 1620s.
Carrier was mildly pro-Protestant and viciously anti-Catholic. The tiny remnant of French Protestants around in the 1790s had absolutely no motivation to throw in their lot with a bunch of Catholics protesting an anti-Papal measure and Carrier had absolutely no motivation to persecute Protestants since the Protestants never registered any organized complaint of any kind against the revolutionary government. His party was the engine of pro-Protestant legal reforms in the Constituent Assembly.
Officials from the executive branch raided the premises of the legislative branch. That was a serious breach of basic principles.
When the president goes to the Capitol each year to deliver the State of the Union address, he asks permission of the sergeant at arms, and is announced and admitted to the House chamber. That is entirely ceremonial. But it reinforces the basic principle of separation of powers -- Congress does not answer to the president. Ever. At all.
What's galling is that it was completely unnecessary. If the FBI had asked the Capitol Police to execute the warrant, with FBI and US Marshals assistance, I'd give 99.99% odds the Capitol Police would have gone along.
The agents of the Executive branch just didn't bother to ask. It amounts to a backhanded slap, and I'm not surprised that the Congressional leadership -- both parties -- didn't take kindly to it.
But beyond such disorderly behavior, the Executive and Judiciary are allowed to punish representatives for treason, felony and breach of the peace even if the representative is in the midst of conducting official business (Article I, Section 6, paragraph 1).
Punishment is not the issue. Jefferson has still not been punished, for the straightforward reason that he has not been convicted. The search of the Capitol office was investigation, not punishment.
Ironically, a lot of the principles of the Constitution are almost forgotten because the Constitution has worked so well. The Founders feared that the president could order mass arrests of members of Congress to stifle dissent.
No president has ever tried such a thing. Because they've all known, thanks to the 1st Amendment-protected rights of free speech, press, assembly and petition, that the fit would hit the shan.
That said, any branch of government should resist any other branch nibbling at the edges of its prerogatives. Especially when the agents of the executive could have worked with the legislative if they just hadn't been lazy, blunt and dumbassed.
Except, of course, when he exercises his veto.
If the FBI had asked the Capitol Police to execute the warrant, with FBI and US Marshals assistance, I'd give 99.99% odds the Capitol Police would have gone along.
Is it at all possible that Justice might be concerned that Jefferson was able to achieve this cornucopia of graft in part because the Capitol force turned a blind eye?
That they would prefer that Jefferson's aides not get a heads up?
It amounts to a backhanded slap, and I'm not surprised that the Congressional leadership -- both parties -- didn't take kindly to it.
I'm shocked that the colleagues of Randy Cunningham and William Jefferson would be concerned.
The search of the Capitol office was investigation, not punishment.
If they are allowed to physically arrest a member conducting official business, they are certainly allowed to serve a warrant for his files.
The Founders feared that the president could order mass arrests of members of Congress to stifle dissent.
Yet more conflation of warrants for arrests with warrants for files.
Two different things.
Especially when the agents of the executive could have worked with the legislative if they just hadn't been lazy, blunt and dumbassed.
LOL! Justice was lazy and dumbassed - not like those ultrasharp Congressional cops! No graft on their watch!
I’ll bet the media will spin this until they feel people are too dizzy to care about it.
Where do you get that? Members of Congress can be arrested, tried and convicted like anyone else. The narrow exception is the "speeches and debates" clause, which immunizes members of Congress from punishment for official acts performed while Congress is in session. It is theoretically possible for someone to remain a sitting representative while in prison. I do not know of a case where that actually happened.
Your reference to "the leadership" has no constitutional basis. The Constitution provides for the offices of Speaker of the House and President Pro Tempore of the Senate; the majority leader, minority leader, whips and committee chairs are important to the process, but their offices cannot be found in the Constitution. The Constitution deliberately -- and I believe, naively -- did not predict a two-party system.
A member of the House or Senate can be expelled by a majority vote of each house's membership. Not its leadership. In practical terms, it's unlikely a vote would get to the floor without the blessing of at least one party's leadership, but that is a practice, not a rule, let alone a law.
Adam Clayton Powell, D-Harlem, was convicted of corruption and expelled by the House. He ran for re-election and won. The House voted not to seat him. SCOTUS ruled that the House's power to judge the "qualifications" of its members did not allow it to disqualify someone for actions before the last election -- the people are the ultimate sovereign, and the people of Powell's district made their choice.
BTW, neither the Executive nor the Judiciary are considered "representative", and are a source of possible tyranny. In conflicts between the House and the Executive regarding the status of the members of the House, the Constitution clearly establishes the House as the superior body.
When it comes down to brass tacks, the most representative -- or in other terms, the most democratic (note the small d) -- government body holds the trump card. That's the House. Or, if it comes down to the need for a constitutional amendment, the state legislatures.
Remember, to stick Jim Traficant in jail the House had to eject him.
Not so. Traficant was tried and convicted and headed to prison before the House expelled him. I suppose there might have been a scenario where he might have avoided custody if he remained on the Capitol grounds and the House hadn't given him the boot.
No one, aside from Traficant, wanted to ride out that kind of farce. There were only two votes against Traficant's expulsion -- one was Jim Traficant, and the other was Gary Condit. Condit had already lost his re-election bid and was widely suspected of killing his intern/alleged mistress, so I assume his vote was to make some kind of point that made sense to him at the time.
Congress as an institution has that immunity. Individual members of Congress do not.
The way that immunity is taken away is that Congress expels them. See Article 1, Section 5, Clause 2. It's all in there.
See how brief it is ~ Congress, by design, is authorized to protect itself and may even call out the militia (presumably to repel an invader, or dispose of a tyrant).
That's why they expelled him (See Article 1, Section 5, Clause 2.)
Bet you missed that part during all the myriad of discussions we had regarding the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Still, there it was, the clause that dictates that the House must organize and have a Speaker is in there right before the impeachment part.
Again, ground glass, your knees, supplicant posture ~ we are patient.
Heretofore, the FBI has ALWAYS gotten the assent of the Speaker of the House before messing around with Congressional offices. This time the Attorney General decided that over 200 years of American tradition and law should simply be ignored ~ that's because he's a punk who has no business in public office. I'm shocked that we actually had people on this board advocating appointing this guy to the Supreme Court.
You show up at the Capitol Building and try to break into somebody's office, you will discover the militia (Capitol police) are authorized to shoot you dead.
Such things have happened.
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