Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[FearfulJesuit]

Huh. I stand corrected!

[Lord Shonus]

Huh. I stand corrected!

I was also not quite correct. In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme court restated that suspending the writ was a power of Congress.

Likewise, we have made clear that, unless Congress acts to suspend it, the Great Writ of habeas corpus allows the Judicial Branch to play a necessary role in maintaining this delicate balance of governance, serving as an important judicial check on the Executive's discretion in the realm of detentions. [...] it would turn our system of checks and balances on its head to suggest that a citizen could not make his way to court with a challenge to the factual basis for his detention by his government, simply because the Executive opposes making available such a challenge. Absent suspension of the writ by Congress, a citizen detained as an enemy combatant is entitled to this process.

[Descan]

Not like you guys weren't acting like Habeas Corpus was a thing for the past decade and a half...

* Descan looks askance at Guantanamo Bay...

[Lord Shonus]

That was the context of the case I cited, and multiple related ones. The current legal conclusion is that the Writ is guaranteed to US citizens, but not foreigners. The Guantanamo prison would have been shut down years ago if Congress hadn't been stonewalling it anyway, as Obama signed a closure order fairly early on.

[Hanslanda]

Not like you guys weren't acting like Habeas Corpus was a thing for the past decade and a half...

* Descan looks askance at Guantanamo Bay...

I think Habeas Corpus applies to citizens, not to possible POW/international criminal/ 'foreign agent provocateur'/whatever you might possibly label them as to squeak shit past the red tape. Or at least, that's how I'm imagining the Gov't trying to pass it off, that way they aren't actually breaking their own laws.

But maybe that's just a false supposition on my part.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Yeah, the kind of strange thing about the Constitution and civil liberties is that it doesn't make much noise about non-citizens. So you can take that one of two ways: non-citizens have all the (non-voting) rights citizens logically have, or non-citizens have no rights and may be abused with impunity unless the states seek to restrict that behavior. Fortunately, the former interpretation has been the dominant one since the founding of the Union (even the thing about voting rights didn't stand up then, there were elections with non-citizens legally in them until the late 1800's), but the anti-immigrant portions of the right make me worry about the latter from time to time...

[Yoink]

It just occurred to me that if you think of 'Pokémon X & Y' as the algebra terms, it becomes an amusing in-joke about their business model.

[Descan]

When I heard of X and Y, I just thought they were place-holder names...

Like, seriously, they sound so much like place-holder names. "You need X, Y, and Z to do this!" kind of thing?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

It's X, Y, and soon to be Z, as in coordinates. Because it's on the 3DS.

[Furtuka]

Also cause of this whole DNA motif it has going on with the mega evolutions and related paraphernalia.

[Bouchart]

I suspect that part of the problem is that the closest thing the US has known to a genuine tyrant was George III (I suppose that a case could be made against Adams, Jackson, or Lincoln), and the British rule at the end of the Colonial period was more "utterly incompetent" then it was "actively repressive". Having never had a Hitler or Cromwell, but being institutionally paranoid of developing one, has lead many of us to be unable to tell the difference between "disagrees with our political viewpoint" and "intends to enslave us all and crush us under his iron boots." Combine that with the fact that one of the major ruling parties has been in decline since at least the 1920s (and probably since the 1870s), and you have the makings of a very, very polarized political battlefield that encourages extreme positions.

I'd argue against the inclusion of Lincoln on that list (or, if we do include him, we also include all the more modern presidents who abuse wartime powers), given that his handling of the suspension of habeas corpus was fairly remarkable insofar as that he went out of his way to avoid abusing it.

Lincoln spent his entire presidency slaughtering people.

[Eric Blank]

That tends to happen during civil wars, yeah.

[MaximumZero]

Huge management shakeup in the company that I'm currently a peon for. 2000+ jobs across the States were cut, more probably on the way. 5 people, 3 of which I know pretty well, were cut from my store alone.

I need a new job. I don't foresee my store surviving the impending retail apocalypse.

[My Name is Immaterial]

Teen goes to private school, does really well until she starts drinking, grades slip, gets kicked off the campus ministry and her captaincy of the cheer-leading squad is revoked, turns 18, gets kicked out by her parents, turns around and sues them, saying they have to support her and pay for her college.
Three cheers for America's legislative culture! Have a problem? Sue someone!

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Hey, if courts are willing to rule that children have to provide money to their retired parents, then I don't see why the reverse shouldn't be true for somebody going to college. Hell, the latter would even provide for the former.