Criminal code does include mandatory minimum sentences and punishments, which are valid. If I get 13 points on my license in a year, I lose it without a judge ever being involved.
It is something the Fed prohibits via the Commerce Clause once someone has a felony on their record.
Most Federal law is now based on a misreading of the Commerce Clause. In that we agree. However, all states except Vermont restrict access to firearms by felons, and that has nothing to do with the Commerce Clause. So if you could repeal all of the excessive federal laws, you would still be faced with the state laws.
I think revocation of unalienable rights beyond the completion of a sentence is cruel and unusual.
If the state has a law stating lifetime restrictions as a minimum punishment for a given crime, I don't see how you get around that being part of the sentence. You are wishing to create a definition of sentence that only includes part of the mandated punishment. That you think it is cruel and unusual is noted, but I find pulling off someone's arms and legs or drawing out their internal organs to be more deserving of the term.
You get around it by finding the lifetime restriction to be unconstitutional. That's what this entire debate is about.
Is your position that there is no such thing as an unconstitutional lifetime restriction of a right enumerated in the bill of rights?
I'm glad you brought this up.
Impris at Hillsdale has a great article on the rise of "administrative law":
The History and Danger of Administrative Law [More Precisely, Administrative "Power"]
Hillsdale College ^ | September 2014 | PHILIP HAMBURGER
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3214734/posts
[T]he rise of administrative law is essentially a re-emergence of the absolute power practiced by pre-modern kings. The constitutional history of the past thousand years in common law countries records the repeated ebb and flow of absolutism...
[O]rdinarily kings bound their subjects through proclamations or decrees—or what we today call rules or regulations...dispensations and suspensions—or what we today call waivers...their prerogative courts—courts such as the King’s Council, the Star Chamber, and the High Commission—or what we today call administrative courts.
[D]efenders of this sort of prerogative power were not squeamish about describing it as absolute power. Absolutism was their justification.
These claims on behalf of absolutism, of course, did not go unchallenged...Magna Carta in 1215...Parliament in 1354 and 1368 enacted due process statutes...in 1641 Parliament abolished the Star Chamber and the High Commission...English constitutional law.
Americans established the Constitution to be the source of all government power and to bar any absolute power. [T]wo of many constitutional problems illuminated by the re-emergence of absolutism in the form of administrative power [are] delegation and procedural rights.
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Of course, Fascists and gasbags (but I repeat myself...) are IN LOVE with "administrative law", as we can see by the above post by SampleGas, and in many of his prior postings on this thread:
SampleMan wrote - Criminal code does include mandatory minimum sentences and punishments, which are valid. If I get 13 points on my license in a year, I lose it without a judge ever being involved.