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Senator Rand Paul is boasting about how he preserved the right of every American citizen to a trial by jury through an amendment that he cosponsored with Senators Mike Lee and Dianne Feinstein. His press release claims that he has protected “the rights prescribed to Americans in the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution with regard to indefinite detention and the right to a trial by jury.” But check out Congressman Justin Amash’s more accurate assessment of what occurred: “The heart of the Feinstein amendment: ‘An authorization to use military force, a declaration of war, or any similar authority shall not authorize the detention without charge or trial of a citizen or lawful permanent resident of the United States apprehended in the United States, UNLESS AN ACT OF CONGRESS EXPRESSLY AUTHORIZES SUCH DETENTION.’ [Amash’s emphasis]. Well, that Act of Congress is the 2012 NDAA, which renders the rest of the Feinstein amendment meaningless.”
Amash is right and Paul is wrong. The Military Commissions Act and the 2012 NDAA are both acts of Congress that authorize the unlimited detention of American citizens and anyone else together with subsequent processing through military tribunals or no trial at all.
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I don’t know what Paul is crowing about, he knows full well that the 2012 NDAA gutted about half the Bill of Rights. The next NDAA/MCA will ban private gun ownership under some national security clause.
Section 1021 provides that disposition under the law of war will be made of any case where “terrorism” is suspected. That would include as as an offense “Material Support for Terrorism,” which the government has interpreted as anything from a little old lady in Switzerland giving \$5 to the wrong charity, unsuspectingly of any connection to a so-called “associated force,” to antiwar activists in the midwest, or someone making a video and uploading it onto the internet. But by bringing the “law of war” into our federal code, the authoritarians have finally succeeded in codifying the suspension of the Constitution for political offenses involving free speech. The government make’s no secret of this in their arguments in the Military Commisions, arguing that even shutting down newspapers during the Civil War is legitimate precedent for what can be done under the misnamed “law of war.”
There’s one thing that may help give some positive feelings: This isn’t the first time we’ve gutted everything to ‘protect ourselves from the enemy’. Terrorist is the new Communist after all. Does scare me that a McCarthyism cry was made in 2008, even if we did reject it.
Anyone remember how we broke out of the last spiral? Might be useful with this one.
The Democrats and Republicans vie with one another in expressing impatience with constitutional restraints. So much so that New York Times thought that the time was ripe to publish insidious garbage like this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/31/opinion/lets-give-up-on-the-constitution.html?src=me&ref=general&_r=0
Yeah, let’s round-file the Constitution and let the supremely wise, omnicompetent and virtuous folk who wrecked the place do whatever the hell they feel like. All that constitutional restraints do is hinder their self-expression.