Authoritarian Idiocy, Part VII

I'm not exactly hearing a majority-rules roar kind of support for this thing. Maybe it's different where you live, but lots of people DON'T support these kinds of rules.

 

I think it's more the right-wing talk show host-types who compare this war to WW II and say that this sort of thing is no different than anything FDR did then, but at that time people accepted it as doing what we had to do to win the war. Then they point out that we never would have won WW II with the media we have today.

 

Not attack you Small, but that line of argument is a bunch of bullshit. The first Gulf War had no problem being sold successfully to people. And the idea that WWII wouldn't have been won is nothing but a bunch of speculative crap. We're talking about the here and now, the reality. That's never been a valid argument.

 

It's not my arguement. I don't buy the idea that the media "wants us to lose the war" either.

 

Couldn't someone who got out of law school yesterday get this thrown out in court?

How can you write a law that denies citizens the protections of the Bill of Rights?

Doesn't the whole thing, then, collapse on itself?

 

I don't see why habeas corpus hasn't made free men out of all U.S. detainees.

Oh, wait ... they need access to legal counsel to file the brief. :

 

Well, also, in that case the "detainees" aren't citizens. So while i'm not sure what their legal footing is, I guess an argument can be made.

When dealing with US citizens, though, it would seem to me that no law passed by Congress can supercede, for example, the Fourth Amendment.

Maybe one of our nascent lawyers knows more than I do.

 

I don't know the specifics of the plan, but the easiest way to do it is simply deny access to the federal courts. The Constituion allows Congress to define the appellate jurisdiction of the federal courts, even the Supreme Court. If you remember, Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act, which stripped the jurisdiction of the federal courts to hear habeas cases from Gitmo detainees. The Supreme Court dealt with the issue in Hamdan and didn't declare it unconstitutional, but simply said that it was not passed in time to apply to Hamdan. So you strip the detainees of their rights, then strip them of their access to the federal courts to seek any kind of remedies.

 

So now we're back to the Dred Scott days, i.e. you have no right to sue for freedom or rights?

 

When we put this thing away, you can brand the fourth amendment on my butt.

 

Thank you, Sean Archer.