The United States Senate, in a 93-7 vote, has passed a bill that violates the United States Constitution according to the ACLU and other legal scholars.The problem is a clause in the current war legislation determining how many hundreds of billions of dollars will be spent in the ongoing oil wars.
If that clause becomes the law then any U.S. citizen anywhere in the United States or elsewhere can merely be accused of wrongdoing then taken to GITMO to be held indefinitely without formal charges and without trial.
Right wing Republican warmongers and clueless Democrats put the language in the bill, saying that is what the law already is anyway.
So I wonder if the ACLU will file a lawsuit to have it held unconstitutional because it violates the 4th Amendment:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons ... against unreasonable ... seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the ... persons ... to be seized."(Constitution, 4th Amendment); the 5th Amendment:
"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury ... nor be deprived of ... liberty ... without due process of law ..."(Constitution, 5th Amendment); the 6th Amendment:
"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury ... and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense."(Constitution, 6th Amendment); and the 8th Amendment:
"... nor [shall] cruel and unusual punishments [be] inflicted."(Constitution, 8th Amendment). Furthermore, the Supreme Court has not taken the position the Senators wrongly said they had taken:
At this difficult time in our Nation’s history, we are called upon to consider the legality of the Government’s detention of a United States citizen on United States soil as an “enemy combatant” and to address the process that is constitutionally owed to one who seeks to challenge his classification as such. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held that petitioner’s detention was legally authorized and that he was entitled to no further opportunity to challenge his enemy-combatant label. We now vacate and remand. We hold that although Congress authorized the detention of combatants in the narrow circumstances alleged here, due process demands that a citizen held in the United States as an enemy combatant be given a meaningful opportunity to contest the factual basis for that detention before a neutral decisionmaker.(Hamdi v. Rumsfeld). Further, the dissent of conservative Justice Scalia joined by moderate Justice Stevens in Hamdi, was even more contrary to the Senate's waywardness.
Whatever happened to the "strict constructionists" that the neoCon fascists in the Senate always talked about, and what happened to the "democratic" Senators who were shamefully undemocratic by voting for fascism?
These lyrics are the song in the two videos below:
My very life today
If I don't get some shelter
Oh yeah, I'm gonna fade away
War, children, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
War, children, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
Ooh, see the fire is sweepin'
Our very street today
Burns like a red coal carpet
Mad bull lost its way
War, children, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
War, children, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
Rape, murder!
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
Rape, murder!
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
Rape, murder!
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
The floods is threat'ning
My very life today
Gimme, gimme shelter
Or I'm gonna fade away
War, children, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
I tell you love, sister, it's just a kiss away
It's just a kiss away
It's just a kiss away
It's just a kiss away
It's just a kiss away
Kiss away, kiss away
Actually, I think the version of the constitution that strict constuctionists use is the one you get by using Google translator to convert it into Greek and then back into English.
ReplyDeleteJohn,
ReplyDeleteYes.
Read the dissent of Scalia & Stevens in Hamdi, linked to in the updated post.
It is an impeccable, well written opinion by a conservative Justice which the neoCons in the Senate must have overlooked.
Here is the lineup of Senators who will go fascist on anything and any of us: Link
ReplyDeleteI'm not smart enough to know whether Scalia is really as brilliant as he pretends to be, but it seems like if he really is that brilliant, he would write more opinions like the exceedingly rare one you link to. What's up with that?
ReplyDeleteJohn,
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me not to be an issue of being brilliant, but one of ingrained constitutional views.
Scalia is strong on jury protections (e.g. Blakeley v Washington) to the point of voting with the "liberals" on that and some other issues.
But there are other areas of law where he does not.
Jurists are like that.
I take it to be amalgams of experience and social background rather than I.Q., brain size, or heart size.