On 24/10/2006, at 2:21 AM, Dan Minette wrote:
Can't you see how insidious this is?
No, because the American legal system doesn't work that way.
...doesn't work *what* way? Bad laws have been used in the past to
detain people that haven't done anything wrong. It takes years to
right these wrongs through the courts, and in the meantime the
President gets the powers he wants for whatever he desires.
The fact is, as the law stands a US citizen can be detained
indefinitely without charge unless and until a friend gets them out
with a lengthy court procedure. That's insidious in my book.
Let me ask a question about the UK legal system. Let's say
Parliament
passes a law that prohibits the criticism of the government during
a war,
and that the House of Lords approves it (IIRC, they can still
reject a bill
once by sending it back to the House of Commons, but I may be wrong
about
this.)
The courts have greater powers of interpretation. While it's hard for
an Act of Parliament to be struck down by the Law Lords, it can be
rendered impotent by the courts through precedents.
OK, let's look at the restrictions on civil liberty that have been
recently
passed in the UK. Which have been rendered impotent?
I don't know if any have. But that's somewhat besides the point.
But this is the major difference: in the UK we don't have enshrined
civil liberties in the form of a Bill of Rights, you do. So it's a
lot more obvious when those rights are being eroded.
Given this, which we all seem to know, why do you think that the
latest law,
which doesn't suspend habeas corpus for citizens, changes the legal
rights
of the President from what they were in 2000? The FDR precedent
seems to be
far stronger and much more straightforwardly applied than this law.
The President can now hold a citizen indefinitely until someone else
gets them out. So the individual can have their habeus corpus right
suspended until a family member or friend (who knows they've been
arrested under this law and doesn't just think that they've
disappeared...) gets a court case together.
An individual citizen can be imprisoned indefinitely until their
status has been determined. It turns out that they're not an alien
and were imprisoned illegally. And so the forces of justice and
liberty march on.
Indeed, with respect to the Presidential power to declare citizens
enemy
combatants, construct tribunals, and execute them on the decisions
of these
tribunals, the actions of the last 5 years has slightly restricted
Bush's
power from what the Supreme Court declared FDR's power to be.
But he's trying as hard as he can to grab more.
Charlie
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