On 23 Nov 2013, at 05:00, meekerdb wrote:
On 11/22/2013 5:38 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 7:51 PM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net>
wrote:
On 11/21/2013 1:50 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 20 Nov 2013, at 22:20, Richard Ruquist wrote:
Chief Supreme Court Justice Marshall usurped the Constitution
when he maintained that the Supreme Court had the right to rule
laws made by Congress and signed by the President unconstitutional.
As a result the USA is essentially ruled by the Supreme Court
There is no provision in the US Constitution for this right.
Congress instead has the right to regulate the Supreme Court,
The supreme court has judged the NDAA 2012 anti-constitutional. But
apparently this has changed nothing. I don't find information on
this. Some
sites on this have just disappeared.
It changed nothing because it didn't happen. First, the NDAA
authorizes the
defense budget and other things. The Supremes would not have
found it
"anti-constitutional". The controversial provision you may be
thinking of
was clause that affirmed the Presidents power to detain people
without trial
as set out in the 2001 resolution following the 9/11 attack. The
ACLU has
challenged this provision and a case was brought in 2012, Hedge v
Obama. A
district court ruled that the indefinite detention provision was
unconstitutional and gave an injunction against its use. This
went up
through the layers of appeals courts. The Supreme Court threw out
the
injunction on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked legal
standing to bring
the case - and so in effect upheld the law without actually ruling
on
whether or not it is constitutional.
This is an aspect of U.S. law inherited from English law, that
only persons
who are actually harmed by a law can challenge it in court. More
modern
democracies, seeing the importance of the U.S. Supreme Court in
being able
to nullify unconstitutional laws, have explicitly provided for
court review
of laws without there having to be a plaintiff and a case.
Brent,
I would say you're making an implicit extraordinary claim here. This
claim being that the reason why certain fundamental rights (like the
right to a trial) are not being is bureaucratic impediment, as
opposed
to these impediments being created for the purpose of preventing the
application of said rights in practice.
?? Left out some words?
I argue that this claim is extraordinary for the following reasons:
- The President signed the NDAA. He also swore to defend the
constitution and he's supposed to be a constitutional expert, so it
is
not likely that he is not aware that citizens have a fundamental
right
to a trial.
The controversial clause of the NDAA only applies to citizens who
have taken up arms or aided organizations that have taken up arms
against the U.S. and only for the duration of the war against Al
Quida and the Taliban.
You might give a quote. It looks like what it has been asked to Obama
to make precise, and he refused to do so. It seems to me that it is
explicit that all "suspect of threat" are concerned with no explicit
reference to Al Qaeda, nor Taliban. Just suprressing a coma or a
period in some sentence would have clarified, but even that was
rejected by Obama's administration.
So you are confused on several counts. This is what the 6th
amendment actually says:
"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to
a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and
district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district
shall have been previously ascertained by law, 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."
Note that it refers to a criminal trial.
Indeed. That's the problem. If you are suspected of threat, you better
do a crime just to have some lawyer!
An enemy soldier captured in wartime is not a criminal.
But a war on terror, typically, makes the wartime infinite, and
transforms the whole country (the US) into a battlefield.
Second, it clearly refers to crimes committed in a state or district
of the U.S. - not Afghanistan or Iraq. So it is not at all
unconstitutional to deny a trial to those captives in Guantanomo. I
agree that they should be tried, but the use of a military tribunal
is certainly not unconstitutional.
If a military tribunal is used. But the NDAA (and the patriot act)
dismisses any trial, military or not.
The detention ends with the end of the hostility/war, but I thought
Obama would close Guantanamo (as he promised) and end the hostility
after the death of Bin Laden. Now, the way he acts suggests that there
is just no end possible to such type of hostility. The notion of
threat and terror are too fuzzy for that.
As the evidences add up that 9/11 might be a false flag, you can
imagine how easy you can prolongate (or begin) such hostilities.
He was not forced to sign the NDAA by bureaucracy (he
might have been forced in other ways, but here we get into pure
speculation). It was fully within his powers not to sign it or to
demand changes;
Demanding things of Congress doesn't necessarily get them
(particularly when the House is controlled by the Republicans).
Then he could have decided to not sign it. The NDAA was allocating the
budget of defense, so that would have put some pressure to modify the
bills. On the contrary, Obama justifies his signing by telling us that
the budget needed to be accepted. Why? That's ridiculous. The very
idea of putting such bills in a budget proposal is already suspect.
I was on the side of the americans on the war on terror, until the
NDAA 2012, which I can't help to feel as placing the war on terror in
the category of the war on drug, which I suspect (due to tuns of
evidences) to have been unfounded right at the start, knowingly so.
Anslinger, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush have explicitly and knowingly lie
and dismiss most information on cannabis provided by their own team of
researchers.
Apparently Obama won against the supreme court:
http://rt.com/usa/obama-ndaa-appeal-suit-229/
Bruno
- Harm is a very subjective word. If the Supreme Court was interested
in upholding fundamental rights, it could easily interpret loss of
fundamental human rights as harm;
The point is that the people who were plaintiffs in the case weren't
harmed.
- The bureaucratic impediments seem to work mostly in a direction of
loss of freedom. Empirically, it does not look plausible that they
are
just neutral attrition -- they prevent Guantanamo from being closed,
they allow for total surveillance, they allow the Federal Government
to go after marijuana businesses that were authorised by their
states,
they allow for "free speech zones", they allow for random road check
points and so on;
- The constitution is the highest law. If people were serious about
following it, they couldn't possible let some lower level law get in
the way. It's a truism that anything that prevents the application of
constitutional principles is unconstitutional, and a lot of people in
the USA swore to defend the constitution.
And they are. You are just assuming that it says what you think it
should say, instead of what it actually says.
Brent
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